Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seismic loss analysis of buckling-restrained braced frames considering the effects of modeling uncertainties

While the design criteria for buckling-restrained braced frames are advancing, understanding the functional behavior of these types of frames during the occuring earthquakes can considerably contribute in the evolution of the design criteria for these frames. In this regard, taking the modeling uncertainties into account will help in carrying out a more rational seismic performance assessment and seismic design of these types of structures. The main goal of this manuscript is to include the modeling uncertainties in the seismic loss mathematical curves of the buckling-restrained braced frames (BRBF). The variation of the modulus of elasticity and the yield strength constitute the sources of the uncertainties for this study. The two-dimensional 4-, 8-, and 12-story frames ,selected from symmetrical three-dimensional structures, were studied. Finally, it was concluded that the uncertainties existed in the yield stress and the modulus of elasticity parameters were more effective on the probabilistic seismic demand curves for the lower intensity levels, than the higher strong ground motion intensities. Besides all these, the variations of seismic-induced loss curves are presented considering the effect of the uncertainties compared to those neglecting the uncertainties. The calculated loss curves confirm the significance of taking the sources of uncertainties into account in the seismic loss analysis of the structures.
Tourist Intercultural Competence: A Multidimensional Measurement and Its Impact on Tourist Active Participation and Memorable Cultural Experiences

Cultural tourism has received increasing attention. Tourists’ intercultural competence represents the abilities to appropriately and efficiently interact with people across different cultures, helping tourists attain developing positive cultural exchange experiences. By adopting both qualitative and quantitative approaches, a multidimensional measurement of tourists’ intercultural competence was developed and validated in this study. Four factors of tourists’ intercultural competence were identified: intercultural responsibility, understanding, appreciation, and action. Furthermore, this study examined the association between tourists’ intercultural competence and memorable cultural experience and determined the mediating effects of tourists’ active participation. This study contributes to the cultural tourism literature by proposing a measurement of tourists’ intercultural competences and by establishing a framework illustrating how cultural tourists interact with different cultures, thus attaining memorable cultural experiences. Managerial implications for destination marketing and tourist management are discussed herein.
SERVICE QUALITY PRACTICES TOWARDS ORGANISATIONAL PERFORMANCE THROUGH VALUE CREATION AND THE MODERATING EFFECTS OF ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE

The objective of this paper is to conceptualise how service quality practices influence the organisational performance within the perspective of the internal customer of the organisation. Relevant literature has been reviewed and related propositions have been developed in relations with service quality practices, value creation, organisational performance and organisation structure. The paper emphasises on the value creation process underlies in the theory of social exchange and consider value creation as a mediator in linking the service quality practices and the performance of the organisation. Organisational structure has been considered as a moderator as it is believed to have effects on the relationship between service quality practices and value creation. Research proposition and a conceptual model have been offered for further consideration, and this paper incorporated the concept of reciprocation and spiralling effects of value co-creation with an emphasises on the perspective of the internal customer of the organisation.
Rice Plant Disease Detection using Image Processing: A Review

Rice plant diseases identification is significant in the forthcoming progress of the agricultural field. Since last decade identification of plant disease using image processing techniques have played vital role in agriculture research. Various methods of disease detection, classification and quantification developed and applied to crops. This paper reviews related research on different diseases classification techniques that can be used for plant leaf disease detection . Also based on image segmentation, feature extraction, feature selection and classification methods comparative study is prepared. Also this paper presents an algorithm for image segmentation technique which is used for automatic detection and classification of plant leaf diseases.
Valuation of Viticultural Adaptation to Climate Change in Vineyards: A Discrete Choice Experiment to Prioritize Trade-Offs Perceived by Citizens

On a climate change scenario, a discrete choice experiment was applied to elicit the trade-off values for three environmental impacts of current viticultural management practices in vineyards of Mendoza, Argentina. Water availability for other uses was found to be the most concerning topic for the population, followed by use of chemical fertilizers and then by use and conservation of biodiversity. An increase of one percentage point in water availability was estimated to add each citizen on average 13.05 Argentinean pesos – 0.74 US dollars – per year in terms of increased welfare, a figure equivalent to the welfare drop a citizen would experience after an increase of 1.45 percentage points in the use of chemical fertilizers annually per hectare, or a decrease of 2.69 percentage points in the use and conservation of biodiversity. These trade-off values may help policy makers, planners, regional managers, and ecologists to take social preferences into account in setting resource allocation priorities intended to support viticulture. This study approach provides a framework that could guide similar assessments in other regions.
The Impact of Corporate Governance and Disclosure on Non-Jordanian Ownership in Jordanian Manufacturing and Service Companies: An Empirical Study

This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of corporate governance and the extent of disclosure on non-Jordanian ownership in Jordanian manufacturing and service companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE). The study was conducted on 68 companies for the year 2019. Data was collected from the annual reports of the companies and from the website of the ASE. Corporate governance was measured by board size, the proportion of nonexecutive directors, existence of the audit committee and institutional ownership. The extent of disclosure was measured by a disclosure index. While non-Jordanian ownership was measured by the percentage of shares owned by non-Jordanian investors (Arab and Foreign investors). In addition, company size, profitability, liquidity, and financial leverage were used as control variables. To examine the study hypotheses, multiple regression analysis was used. The results revealed that non-Jordanian ownership is positively related to institutional ownership ratio, proportion of nonexecutive directors as a proxy for board independence, company size and extent of disclosure. In addition, the results indicated the existence of a negative relationship between non-Jordanian ownership and debt ratio, though, at the 10% level of significance. Conclusions drawn from the current study may be of interest to policy makers and regulators in developing countries who want to improve the flow of foreign capital in their markets.
Spatio-Temporal Study on Supply and Demand
Matching of Ecosystem Water Yield Service
– A Case Study of Wei River Basin

Wei River, as the largest tributary of the Yellow River, is facing an increasingly serious shortage of water resources. Therefore, it has a great significance to study the correlation between the supplydemand characteristics of water yield service and the spatial matching of supply and demand for the management and efficient allocation of water resources in the region. Based on the land use data, precipitation data, evaporation data, and water consumption data of the Wei River basin in 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015, we used spatial analysis tools of the InVEST model, ArcGIS and GeoDa to calculate the supply and demand of water yield service in the research area, then analyzed and evaluated the matching status of supply and demand of water yield service in the region. The results showed that: (1) The total water yield of Wei River basin in 2015 increased by 271 million m3 compared with that in 2000, among which the water yield per unit area varies in different categories: unused land>construction land>farm land>grass land>forest>water area; (2) During the study period, water yield service was mostly deficit, and there were differences among different regions. The total supply of water yield service increased year by year, and the total demand decreased firstly and then increased. Spatially water yield service supply is high in the south and low in the north, while demand is relatively stable; (3)The number of low-low spatial matching in Wei River basin was the largest, accounting for 20.43% of the whole Wei River basin. The high-high spatial matching was mainly concentrated in Guanzhong plain, Xi ‘an, Shaanxi province. The high-low spatial dislocation only involved Fengxiang county of Shaanxi province in the south of the study area. The result of this study is helpful for the government to rationally allocate water resources in Wei River basin, and to ensure the high-quality and sustainable development of the ecological environment in Yellow River basin ultimately.
Consumers’ Reactions to the Interaction Between Scented Environments and Impulsive Purchasing Tendency

The aim of this paper is to examine the mediating role of consumers’ impulsive purchasing tendency in explaining the impact of the presence of a pleasant fragrance over their reactions in a store. A quasi-experiment was conducted in a Sisley clothing store in which two conditions were tested: presence vs. absence of a scented atmosphere. A survey was conducted on a convenient sample containing 200 customers (102 for the unscented environment and 98 for the scented environment). A Partial Least Squares (PLS) method was used to estimate the mediating effect of impulsive purchasing tendency. The results indicate that consumers’ impulsive purchasing tendency mediates the impact of fragrance over a multitude of reactions. The presence of an olfactory stimulation in a store increases consumers’ impulsive purchasing tendency which leads to more expenses and impulsive purchasing, a better perception of products and the store, more ease in finding products and more intense feelings of pleasure and arousal.
Automatic First Break picking with Deep Learning

: A key step in seismic data processing is first break (FB) picking, or rather, determining the onset of the first seismic arrivals in seismic records. FB picking is tedious and time-consumingtask and robustness and efficient automatic method are essential. Many automated FB-picking algorithms already exist that reduce the dependence on human interaction. The goal of this project is to improve automated FB picking by capturing the expertise of FB picking through supervised training of deep neural network from the field of machine vision. We have evaluated several neural network architectures and found a seven layer U-net with skip connections to provide the best results on seismic shot gathers portioned into 64x64 windows. We applied the trained networks to unseen data with encouraging results, provided pre-processing is applied to make the unseen data similar to the training data. Additionally, by adding a small number of picked gathers from a new dataset to an existing training dataset, the algorithm performs well on the new dataset. We also found that the network is robust against a small amount of mispicks in the training data, and can actually improve these erroneous picks.
Prediction of habitat suitability for Wild Goat, Capra aegagrus (Erxleben, 1777) in Kavir National Park, Semnan Province, Iran

Habitat with its components is the most important need of wildlife species. So that, habitat management is a critical procedure in wildlife conservation. In the present study, desirable habitats of Kavir National Park for Wild goat are determined in two distinguished warm and cold seasons, applying Random Forests, Maximum Entropy, and Classification Tree algorithmsa and for this matter “Salford Predictive Modeler” and MaxEnt software were used. Consequently, an ensemble habitat suitability map was provided based on weight-averaging method. The results illustrated that elevation, water resources, vegetation type, and slope are the most important factors in predicting Wild goat’s suitable habitats with a slightly different impact on each season. In general, among the existing plant species, Wild goat prefers Artemisia sieberi, Stipa arabica, Zyghophylom eurpterum, and Sieditzia rozmarinus. Also, the altitudes higher than 1050 meters above sea level, slopes over 20 to 35 percent, and distances less than 5,000 meters to water resources are desirable. Meanwhile, several suitable patches for Wild goats were found which are greatly in need of conservation. Considering the importance of water resources in this region, in order to improve the quality of the habitat, further study on water resources status is suggested.
Strategy Formation Across Organizational Boundaries: An Interorganizational Process Model

Strategic decision‐makers today face complex environments with meta‐problems that cut across multiple industries. Single organizations cannot address these meta‐problems. As a result, organizations collaborate with partners, among them also competitors, and commonly work together in multi‐partner initiatives (MPIs). How these organizations jointly form an interorganizational strategy (IOS), however, is not well understood. In this paper, we extend the current strategy process conceptualizations from an intraorganizational focus of a single firm to an interorganizational process of multiple strategy‐making entities working together. We selected the eMobility sector as our research context to develop such an IOS process model. We first developed 25 cases on MPIs in the German‐speaking area based on interviews and desk research, before we focused on the eMobility ecology in the southern part of Germany. We identified 291 MPIs, conducted interviews with 19 central actors, held several workshops and informal gatherings, and complemented these data with an analysis of publicly accessible documents. Using an inductive research design, we developed a process model that unfolds in three phases: initiation, negotiation and execution. We reveal specific process dynamics in MPIs to be critical in the formation and manifestation of IOS.
THE EFFECT OF EMOTIONS ON THE REPURCHASE INTENTION MEDIATION BY eWOM

Many of researchers are interested in re-searching the emotions of consumers as the focus of research and try to explore the unknown side in terms of consumer psychology. marketers are now trying to learn consumer emotions from various forms that aim to win consumers’ hearts. Consumer emotions will produce different regulations and each different emotion regulation will produce different consumer behavior as well. This study aims to examine emotional regulation such as eWOM and how it affects repurchase intention. This study was conducted with a model describing the relationship between negative emotions, eWOM and repurchase intention and tested by structural equation modeling on data sets consisting of 52 consumer online shop have bad experiences in online shoping.
The Challenges for Women to Achieve Executive Leadership Positions in Private Companies in Brazil

Gender inequality in the business sector still prevails in Brazil, which has one of the lowest rates of women in executive positions in Latin America and in the world. This paper analyzes whether work-life balance, cultural characteristics, and the lack of female representation in organizations are major challenges for female career advancement to executive leadership positions in private companies in Brazil. Through close-ended and open-ended questions, an online survey was used to collect data about the barriers faced by corporate women in Brazil. The findings of the research indicate that work-life balance and the lack of female representation were not reported as major challenges for women’s career ascensión by these respondents; however, cultural characteristics such as machismo and gender discrimination were commonly noted by the participants. The analysis of the barriers encountered by women in Brazil illustrate the labyrinth introduced by Carli & Eagly. Previous studies on this topic focus mainly on interviewing women who hold a leadership position and this study adds the accounts of women who have not yet achieved such position.
Procrustes Dynamic Time Wrapping Analysis for Automated Surgical Skill Evaluation

Article history: Received: 16 September, 2020 Accepted: 21 January, 2021 Online: 12 February, 2021 Classic surgical skill evaluation is performed by an expert surgeon examining an apprentice in a hospital operating room. This method suffers from being subjective and expensive. As surgery becomes more complex and specialized, there is an increase need for an automated surgical skill evaluation system that is more objective and determines more exactly the skills (or lack thereof) the apprentice has. The main purpose of our proposed approach is to use an existing skill database with known proficiency levels to evaluate the skills of a given apprentice. The skill of the apprentice will be assessed to be similar to the closest skill example found in the database (case-based reasoning). A key element of the system is the skill distance measure employed, as each skill example is a multidimensional time series (sequence) with widely varying values. In this paper, we discuss a new surgery skill distance measure denoted as Procrustes dynamic time warping (PDTW). PDTW integrates the search for exact alignment between two skill sequences using DTW and Procrustes distance as a measure for the similarity. The Procrustes approach is a shape distance analysis that involves rotation, scaling, and translation. We evaluated our proposed distance on three surgical motion data, a widely used JIGSAWS robot surgery dataset, a wearable sensor dataset, and a Vicon motion system dataset. The results showed that the proposed framework produced a better performance for surgeon skill assessment when PDTW was used compared to other time series distances on all three datasets. Also, some experimental results for the JIGSAWS dataset outperformed existing deep learning-based methods.
Transcriptome in Hypothalamic Embryonic Neural Stem Cells

Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology (K.A.F., J.Y.Z., D.B.D.), University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Program in Integrative Molecular Biology (M.E.P., D.B.D.), University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Department of Biomedical Informatics (S.L., A.B.C., U.R.C.), University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (M.B.C.), Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma; and Department of Neurobiology (A.P.M.), University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Studying the Stability of Some Metalaxyl Wettable Powder Formulations Currently Applied in Egypt

Three commercial metalaxyl wettable powder (WP) formulations 15% were collected from different sources in Egypt as one of them was locally formulated and the other sources of formulations were readymade from China and Jordan. The formulations under investigation were a mixture of metalaxyl and copper oxychloride currently applied in Egypt where this study was conducted to investigate the stability of metalaxyl as well as studying the formation of its relevant impurity 2, 6-dimethylaniline after storage at 54 2 C and exposure to sunlight for different intervals. Identification and determination of metalaxyl and its relevant impurity content were achieved using GC–FID. From the obtained results metalaxyl showed that, high stability after storage at 54 2 C, which resulted in a decrease in the rate of the formation of relevant impurity 2,6-dimethylaniline, on the other hand metalaxyl revealed that, slightly affected after exposure to sunlight compared to storage at 54 2 C and the formation rate of relevant impurity was relatively higher than storage at 54 2 C, but the amount of relevant impurity 2,6-dimethylaniline was in allowed limits for all sources before and after storage, in addition to that there was no a variation in the rate of degradation of metalaxyl and the amount of its relevant impurity 2,6-dimethylaniline for all sources under investigation.
S0031182017002177jra 1020..1026

The round goby, Neogobius melanostomus, is a Ponto-Caspian fish considered as an invasive species in a wide range of aquatic ecosystems. To understand the role that parasites may play in its successful invasion across Western Europe, we investigated the parasitic diversity of the round goby along its invasion corridor, from the Danube to the Upper Rhine rivers, using data from literature and a molecular barcoding approach, respectively. Among 1666 parasites extracted from 179 gobies of the Upper Rhine, all of the 248 parasites barcoded on the c oxidase subunit I gene were identified as Pomphorhynchus laevis. This lack of macroparasite diversity was interpreted as a loss of parasites along its invasion corridor without spillback compensation. The genetic diversity of P. laevis was represented by 33 haplotypes corresponding to a haplotype diversity of 0·65 ± 0·032, but a weak nucleotide diversity of 0·0018 ± 0·00015. Eight of these haplotypes were found in 88·4% of the 248 parasites. These haplotypes belong to a single lineage so far restricted to the Danube, Vistula and Volga rivers (Eastern Europe). This result underlines the exotic status of this Ponto-Caspian lineage in the Upper Rhine, putatively disseminated by the round goby along its invasion corridor.
Enhancing Organisational Productivity: Dependence of Transformational Leadership on Organisational Culture and Organisational Justice

The qualities of a transformational leader are neither enough nor suffice the creation of leadership impacts on organisational productivity, rather they need support of the organisational culture and justice system. While having the requisite organisational culture and justice for transformational leadership, the leader has less to do. However, it also suggests that introducing transformational leadership in the organisation begins with a lot of efforts on the part of leaders in developing the required background of organisational culture and prevalence of justice as a just culture is helpful in building organisational justice. The leaders’ success is first to create this kind of work-environment emerging in the form of a line of transformational leaders across the organisational hierarchy. The current study, thus, measures the support of the organisational culture and justice, once created, for the relationship between leadership and organisational productivity. The results surprisingly show that despite the significant relationship between the transformational leadership and organisational productivity, both the mediators (organisational culture and justice) disconnect this link and take over the whole responsibility of generating positive variation in organisational productivity. While adopting the transformational-leadership style, the findings are helpful to the managers and administrators of higher education.