Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
a Chance on Me ? Construction Clients ' Perspectives on Risk Management

Having been overwhelmed with a strikingly large list of things that can go wrong, public clients have consistently found themselves subjected to many risks associated with construction projects. As the scale of projects increases, the severity of risks intensifies. This study sets out to highlight a particular set of risks associated with strategic decision making in public construction projects. Of particular importance stands the client organizations’ capacity to properly manage risks rooted in poor decision making that leads to many types of project failure. To curb the negative effects of poor decision making, varying organisational configurations have been adopted by clients. This paper investigates the six Swedish public client organizations’ risk management procedures, the risk types and the frequency by which they reference risk management in their internal documents. The purpose is to explore how organisational measures influence a client’s ability to undertake major construction projects in a manner that is conducive to effective project delivery. The present study is part of an ongoing research project concerning the capabilities of public clients in managing large scale construction projects. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/ peer-review under responsibility of Tampere University of Technology, Department of Civil Engineering.
Calibration of the finite element model of a twelve-span prestressed concrete bridge using ambient vibration data

The recently constructed Newmarket Viaduct in Auckland is a critical link in the New Zealand state highway network. Newmarket Viaduct is a 12-span, pre-cast, post-tensioned structure built using the balanced cantilever method. A continuous health monitoring system was designed and installed in the bridge. As a critical part in the SHM process, a baseline finite element (FE) model of Newmarket Viaduct was established. This paper describes the implementation of the FE model calibration using ambient vibration data. The initial model of the bridge was developed from the information provided in the design documentation, material testing data and site inspections. Two ambient vibration testing campaigns used some 60 wireless sensors in multiple setups to collect data to map with high density 3D mode shapes of the bridge. The output-only modal identification results obtained from the ambient vibration measurements of the bridge were used to update the FE bridge model. Different parameters of the model were calibrated using an automated procedure to improve the correlation between measured and calculated modal parameters. Careful attention was paid to the selection of the parameters to be modified during updating in order to ensure that the changes to the model were realistic and physically meaningful. The calibrated FE model reflecting the as-built structural condition and dynamic response mechanisms of Newmarket Viaduct will serve as a baseline model for assessment of structural health using continuous monitoring data.
Grammar as a Maturational Controlled Behavior: Minimality in Development and Impairment

In his seminal book on the Biological Foundations of Language, Eric Lenneberg proposed that a critical period similar to the one necessary for maturational controlled behaviors applies also to language acquisition (Lenneberg 1967). The notion of a critical period, a maturational stage during which the nervous system is sensitive to specific aspects of the environment, has been considered crucial for language acquisition theories based on the assumption of a biologically predetermined language faculty that needs to be activated by favourable internal and environmental circumstances. Chomsky wrote:
Removal of Artifacts Based on Weighted Guided Filtering For Digital Video Quality Enhancement

It is known that local filtering-based edge preserving smoothing techniques suffer from halo artifacts. Local filter cannot preserve sharp edges when compared to global filters. Such that, halo artifacts are usually produced when local filters adopt to smooth edges.In this paper, weighted guided image filter (WGIF) is proposed by incorporating an edge-aware weighting into an existing guided image filter (GIF) to address the problem. The WGIF is used to adopts both the advantages of global and local smoothing filters in the sense that: 1) the complexity of the WGIF is O(N) for an image with N pixels, which is same as the GIF and 2) the WGIF can avoid halo artifacts like the existing global smoothing filters. The WGIF is applied for single image detail enhancement, single image haze removal, and fusion of differently exposed images. Experimental results shows that the resultant image produces better visual quality by reducing/avoiding the halo artifacts to zero. The extension work is performed on videos, where this video consists of no. of frames. Each frame is converted into image. Every image is filtered by WGIF technique to avoid halo artifacts and to reduce the complexity. After then each image is again converted into frame and then video. The improved quality of video is shown in below results.
MIGRANT WORKERS’ PERCEPTIONS, EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERIENCES OF OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH SERVICES IN FINLAND LEONARD ODHIAMBO APONDI MASTER’S THESIS UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE SCHOOL OF HEALTH SCIENCES

UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE School of Health Sciences APONDI, LEONARD ODHIAMBO: Migrant Workers’ Perceptions, Expectations and Experiences of Occupational Health Services in Finland Master’s Thesis, pages 62, appendix 2 Supervisors: Pirjo Lindfors, PhD, Docent Hanna Rautajoki, PhD Health Sciences (Public Health) May 2015 The northward rising trend in the number of international migrants has resulted to unprecedented implications on healthcare sector. Events accompanying migration have impact on both the migrant population and the hosting community. To understand the challenges encountered by the migrant workers in the host country, it is imperative to explore their encounters with the services by listening to the lived experiences. The aim of this study was to bring out immigrant workers’ expectations and experiences of occupational health services in Finland. The study explored the expectations and lived experiences of the migrant workers. A qualitative research method was used for this study. The study population consisted of 12 participants who were sampled purposively. Data was collected through face-toface interviews. The data was analyzed by thematic content analysis method. The results of the study identified barriers to occupational health services to include language and communication, difficulties arising from navigation through the Finnish healthcare system and issues related to cultural differences. The study also identified workplace safety as being associated to migration and health. In conclusion, the study recognized the process of healthcare access by the migrant worker as being multidimensional. Therefore, the study recommends for enhanced collaborative approach by employers, employees and other relevant stakeholders. The efforts invested towards strengthening health providers’ relationship with care seekers would go a long way in improving occupational health service access.
Foreign Direct Investment in China, the Factors Determining a Preference for Investing in Eastern or Western Provinces

Why do foreign enterprises invest in certain provinces of China? This study started with five possible factors that could influence the decision of multinational corporations: 1) Economic growth; 2) Labor costs; 3) Domestic investments; 4) Agglomeration advantages; and 5) Innovation. The Eastern and Western provinces are slowly converging in terms of foreign direct investments (FDI) and growth rates. Especially after the 11th and 12th five year plans, which were primarily aimed at opening up the Western part of China. Based on a data for the time period 1992-2012 for each of the 30 provinces we analyzed the hypotheses derived from Dunning [1]. After checking for normality and multi-collinearity we estimated the coefficients of the independent variables and their statistical significance. To find different determinants across China, this study opted to do the analysis for the Eastern and Western provinces of China separately. GDP Growth is found to be positively related to FDI in both cases. The wage level is only found to be significant in the Eastern provinces. A reason for this can be that the Eastern China is a step ahead of the Western China, higher educated people are needed and hence higher labor costs are accepted. Domestic investments are found to have a positive effect on FDI in both models. Finally the indicator for agglomeration has a positive significant coefficient: already existing businesses pull MNEs. This effect is found to be stronger in the Eastern provinces; this can be due to the fact that more MNEs have already established their businesses over there. Lastly, the variable patent has the wrong coefficient in both models. These results have policy implications and confirm the importance of certain location factors as suggested in the Dunning model. The government can stimulate FDI in the western provinces by promoting domestic investments in these provinces. Also agglomeration attracts FDI and can be promoted.
Entropic Lower Bound for Distinguishability of Quantum States

For a system randomly prepared in a number of quantum states, we present a lower bound for the distinguishability of the quantum states, that is, the success probability of determining the states in the form of entropy. When the states are all pure, acquiring the entropic lower bound requires only the density operator and the number of the possible states. This entropic bound shows a relation between the von Neumann entropy and the distinguishability.
Recoiling Black Holes in Merging Galaxies

Gravitational-wave (GW) recoil of merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs) may influence the co-evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. We examine this possibility using SPH/N-body simulations of gaseous galaxy mergers in which the merged BH receives a recoil kick. With our suite of over 200 merger simulations, we identify systematic trends in the behavior of recoiling BHs. Our main results are as follows. (1) While BHs kicked at nearly the central escape speed (vesc) are essentially "lost" to the galaxy, in gas rich mergers, BHs kicked with up to about 0.7 vesc may be confined to the central few kpc of the galaxy. (2) The inflow of cold gas during a gas-rich major merger may cause a rapid increase in central escape speed; in such cases recoil trajectories will depend on the timing of the BH merger relative to the change in vesc. (3) Recoil events generally reduce the lifetimes of bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) but may actually extend AGN lifetimes at lower luminosities. (4) Recoiling AGN may be observable via kinematic offsets (v > 500 km s^-1) or spatial offsets (R > 1 kpc) for lifetimes of up to about 10 - 100 Myr. (5) Rapidly-recoiling BHs may be up to about 5 times less massive than their stationary counterparts. These mass deficits lower the normalization of the M - sigma relation and contribute to both intrinsic and overall scatter. (6) Finally, the displacement of AGN feedback by a recoil event causes higher central star formation rates in the merger remnant, thereby extending the starburst phase of the merger and creating a denser, more massive stellar cusp.
Internal Forced Displacement and Crime: Evidence from Colombia

Internal forced displacement, a phenomenon associated to internal conflict, poses important socio-economic challenges for the receiving areas. One of the most relevant aspects is related to crime, since the reception of forced displaced persons might increase inequality and the heterogeneity of population. This paper studies the relationship between internal forced displacement and crime. We use a panel of Colombian municipalities for the period 2003-2016. We include spatial patterns for the study of crime, allowing to capture the dynamics of this relationship across time and space. Our results provide evidence of a spatial correlation between crime and internal forced displacement.
Aggregation of Data by Using Top -K Spatial Query Preferences

A spatial database is a database that is optimized to store and query data that represents objects defined in a geometric space. A spatial preference query ranks objects based on the qualities of features in their spatial neighborhood. For example, using a real estate agency database of flats for lease, a customer may want to rank the flats with respect to the appropriateness of their location, defined after aggregating the qualities of other features (e.g., restaurants, cafes, hospital, market, etc.) within their spatial neighborhood. Such a neighborhood concept can be specified by the user via different functions. It can be an explicit circular region within a given distance from the flat. Another intuitive definition is to assign higher weights to the features based on their proximity to the flat. In this paper, we formally define spatial preference queries and propose appropriate indexing techniques and search algorithms for them. Extensive evaluation of our methods on both real and synthetic data reveals that an optimized branch-and-bound solution is efficient and robust with respect to different parameters. Index Terms: Query processing, spatial databases.
Evaluation of lipophilicity, antimicrobial activity and mutagenicity of some novel ester prodrugs of metronidazole

Various novel aliphatic and aromatic esters of metronidazole have been synthesized to improve the physicochemical properties (Rm values, lipophilicity) using prodrug approach. The alcoholic functional group of metronidazole is readily esterified, thus several novcl ester prodrugs of metronidazole have been synthesized and evaluated for their anacrobic antibacterial activity and mutagenicity, These compounds have been characterized by UV, IR, 1 H NMR, mass spectra and elemental analysis. The partition coefficient of esters is determined by n-octanol/water system, RP-TLC and computed in silico. Anaerobic activity against C. perfingens,determined in terms of MIC (μg/mL) show the esters, particularly SDS-18 and SDS-19, to be more potent in comparison to metronidazole. The Amcs test is used to compare the mutagenic potential of the synthesized 5-nitroimidazoles.
Do Smarter Consumers Get Better Advice? An Analytical Framework and Evidence from German Private Pensions

The existing theoretical and empirical literature considers expert advice to be a substitute for a consumer’s information: According to these papers, more informed consumers should ignore the advice given to them, but the advisor does not (or cannot) take this into account. We show in a simple analytical framework that higher signals of consumer information should indeed lead advisors to provide better services. The model also suggests an identication
Shallow Parsing and Word Sense Disambiguation Used for Machine Translation from Hindi to English Languages

This paper developed innovative algorithms such as shallow parsing and modified Lesk’s algorithm to resolve the issues in Word Sense Disambiguation and performed correct translation from Hindi language to English language. Shallow parsing method is based on Hidden Markov model. We also perform an evaluation for 1657 Hindi tokens with 990 phrases for Parts of speech tagging and Chunking for given Hindi sentence as input and able to achieve Precision, Recall, F-score, Accuracy for Parts of speech tagger: Accuracy: 92.09%; precision: 84.76%; recall: 89.29%; F-score: 86.97, system accuracy for Chunk: Accuracy: 93.96%; precision: 89.33%; recall: 91.31%; F-score: 90.315%. The evaluation is performed by developing confusion matrix in which the system result of Parts of speech tagger and Chunk is compared with Gold standard date provided by IIIT Hyderabad in the summer school 2015. In this paper we discuss the second problem Word Sense Disambiguation in which we enhance the Modified Lesk algorithms by using overlap based method which will find information between three pieces of words in a given context. The system generated result resolves the issues of Word Sense Disambiguation and shows the comparison result with the website Google Translator in which we input polysemy word in a Hindi sentence and same sentence input in our generated system and shows the comparison result of both. The output result shows that our system resolves Word Sense Disambiguation and produces correct translation and Google Translator is fails to resolves the correct Translation.
Characterization of organic nitrogen in aerosols at a forest site in the southern Appalachian Mountains

This study investigates the composition of organic particulate matter in PM2.5 in a remote montane forest in the southeastern US, focusing on the role of organic nitrogen (N) in sulfur-containing secondary organic aerosol (nitrooxy-organosulfates) and aerosols associated with biomass burning (nitro-aromatics). Bulk water-soluble organic N (WSON) represented ~ 14% w/w of water-soluble total N (WSTN) in PM2.5 on average across seasonal measurement campaigns conducted in the spring, summer, and fall of 2015. The largest contributions of WSON to WSTN were observed in spring (~ 18% w/w) and the lowest in the fall (~ 10% w/w). On average, identified nitro-aromatic and nitrooxy-organosulfate compounds accounted for a small fraction of WSON, ranging from ~ 1% in spring to ~ 4% in fall, though were observed to contribute as much as 28% w/w of WSON in individual samples that were impacted by local biomass burning. The highest concentrations of oxidized organic N species occurred during summer (average of 0.65 ng N m−3) along with a greater relative abundance of higher-generation oxygenated terpenoic acids, indicating an association with more aged aerosol. The highest concentrations of nitro-aromatics (e.g., nitrocatechol and methyl-nitrocatechol), levoglucosan, and aged SOA tracers were observed during fall, associated with aged biomass burning plumes. Nighttime nitrate radical chemistry is the most likely formation pathway for nitrooxy-organosulfates observed at this low NOx site (generally < 1 ppb). Isoprene-derived organosulfate (MW216, 2-methyltetrol derived), which is formed from isoprene epoxydiols (IEPOX) under low NOx conditions, was the most abundant individual organosulfate. Concentration-weighted average WSON / WSOC ratios for nitro-aromatics + organosulfates + terpenoic acids were 1 order of magnitude lower than the overall aerosol WSON / WSOC ratio, indicating the presence of other uncharacterized higher-N-content species. Although nitrooxy-organosulfates and nitro-aromatics contributed a small fraction of WSON, our results provide new insight into the atmospheric formation processes and sources of these largely uncharacterized components of atmospheric organic N, which also helps to advance the atmospheric models to better understand the chemistry and deposition of reactive N.
Preferential Trade Agreements under Declining American Hegemony

We examine the international determinants of the formation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) according to the theory of hegemonic stability. The main conclusions are as follows. First, as the theory of hegemonic stability argues, the lack of a stable hegemon fosters the formation of PTAs. When hegemony is measured by trade share and investment share in the global economy, the erosion of hegemony fosters PTAs. Second, hegemony measured by GDP share has a positive effect on PTA formation; however, this measure is not consistent with the theory’s prediction. Third, improvement in the level of democracy worldwide is unrelated to the formation of PTAs.
Mapping transients in the nonlinear dynamics of an optically injected VCSEL

Optical injection is one of the key methods for invoking nonlinear dynamical outputs in laser systems. The system parameters that are used to control the nature of the output from such a system are the injection strength and the frequency detuning between the optical frequency of the free running master and slave lasers. A map of the dynamics can be generated using a number of measurands to facilitate identifying the fundamentally different dynamical regions in the injection-strength/frequency-detuning parameter space. Herein we describe a set of automated algorithms used to establish several measures to identify transients and instabilities in the nonlinear dynamical output of an optically injected vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL), for set and unchanging driving parameters.
Bankruptcy and Financial Standing Models Application for SMEs

This paper describes a system from software application research, development, implementation and testing. The final software tool is a web-based application used as a finance module by SMEs within the FutureSME portal, which supports small and medium companies for better competition on the market. The finance module offers three bankruptcy and financial standing models for evaluation of their financial health. The results are crucial for their ability to get a loan from banks. The self-assessment way of getting results does not require any advisor or bank representative. The described tool was used in practice by partnering companies.
Recursive Incremental Gaussian Mixture Network For Spatio-Temporal Pattern Processing

This work introduces a novel neural network algorithm for online spatio-temporal pattern processing, called Echo State Incremental Gaussian Mixture Network (ESIGMN). The proposed algorithm is a hybrid of two stateof-the-art algorithms: the Echo State Network (ESN), used for spatio-temporal pattern processing, and the Incremental Gaussian Mixture Network (IGMN), applied to aggressive learning in online tasks. The algorithm is compared against the conventional ESN in order to highlight the advantages of the IGMN approach as a supervised output layer. Resumo. Este trabalho introduz um novo algoritmo de redes neurais para processamento online de padroes espaco-temporais, chamado Echo State Incremental Gaussian Mixture Network (ESIGMN). O algoritmo proposto e um hibrido de dois algoritmos estado-da-arte: a Echo State Network (ESN), usada para processamento de padroes espaco-temporais, e a Incremental Gaussian Mixture Network (IGMN), aplicada ao aprendizado agressivo em tarefas online. O algoritmo e comparado com a ESN convencional a fim de destacar as vantagens da abordagem IGMN como camada supervisionada de saida.
A Framework for Web-Based Learning Object Repository in Computer Engineering Education

Abstract Innovative approaches have enhanced and increased the importance and quality of engineering education. In this context, using new techniques and software provides flexible and effective results. In this paper, a web-based educational learning object repository (LOR) software tool, namely Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi Nesne Ambari (Sdunesa), was developed for computer engineering education. This software uses a developmental research method, which is also a derivative of the design-based research method. The developed web-based educational Sdunesa tool is used to store and share learning objects (LO) and their metadata. Moreover, the developed software tool is metadata independent by the help of metadata conversion engine and Extensible Markup Language (XML) web services. To achieve these features, the Sdunesa tool was developed with web 2.0 technologies. Sdunesa is dedicated to the computer engineering field. Qualitative and quantitative research analyses of the software are applied to the students and instructors for evaluation purposes and to demonstrate that the developed software is beneficial for computer engineering education.