Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integrating environmental variables by multivariate ordination enables the reliable estimation of mineland rehabilitation status

Despite the wide variety of variables commonly applied to measure different aspects of rehabilitation, the assessment and subsequent definition of indicators of environmental rehabilitation status are not simple tasks. The main challenges are comparing rehabilitated sites with target ecosystems as well as integrating individual environmental and eventually collinear variables into a single tractable measure of the state of a system before effective indicators that track rehabilitation may be modeled. For that, a consensus is lacking regarding which and how many variables need to be surveyed. Our approach considered ecological processes, vegetation structure, and community diversity from nonrehabilitated, rehabilitating and reference sites. We applied this approach to a curated set of 32 environmental variables retrieved from nonrevegetated, rehabilitating and reference sites associated with iron ore mines from the Urucum Massif, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. By integrating variables from a single attribute or the entire set of variables into a single estimation of rehabilitation status, the proposed multivariate approach is straightforward and able to adequately address collinearity among variables. The proposed approach allows for the identification of biases towards single variables, surveys or analyses, which is necessary to rank environmental variables regarding their importance to the assessment. Furthermore, we show that bootstrapping permitted the detection of the minimum number of environmental variables necessary to achieve reliable estimations of the rehabilitation status. Finally, we show that the proposed variable integration enables the definition of environmental indicators for more comprehensive monitoring of mineland rehabilitation. Thus, the Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 18 September 2019 doi:10.20944/preprints201909.0206. v1
Social Network Privacy Models : A Systematic Literature Review and Directions for Further Research

Privacy is a vital research field for social network (SN) sites (SNS), such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, where both the number of users and the number of SN applications are sharply growing. Recently, there has been an exponential increase in user-generated text content, mainly in terms of posts, tweets, reviews, and messages on SN. This increase in textual information introduces many problems related to privacy. Privacy is susceptible to personal behavior due to the shared online data structure of SNS. Therefore, this study will conduct a systematic literature review to identify and discuss the main privacy issues associated with SN, existing privacy models and the limitations and gaps in current research into SN privacy.
Effects of Snail Shell Powder on the Mechanical Properties of Low Density Polyethylene ( LDPE )

Snail shell powder, a material of animal origin was used as a biodegradable filler and incorporated into low density polyethylene, LDPE, resins to produce green composites of LDPE. The range of added snail shell powder of particle size of 83μm at varying percentages of 0%, 2%, 6% and 10% was added into LDPE. The composites were produced using injection moulding machine. Its effects on the mechanical properties of the polymer composites were tested; which include the tensile strength, percentage elongation at break, flexural strength and hardness. The surface morphology of the polymer composites was analysed via optical microscropy. The results showed that the filler had positive impacts on the mechanical properties of the polymer by increment in tensile strength from 128.29MPa to 137.56 MPa, flexural strength from 120.34 MPa to 145.76MPa and hardness from 43kN to 74kN. While the percentage elongation at break decreased from 200.16 to 168.34. Thus, snail shell powder was found to show great reinforcing properties in the prepared composites and can be used to improve some mechanical properties of polymers since it is organic, cheap, available, eco-friendly and biodegradable material.
Mesh-type Broadband Fixed Wireless

The mesh-type fixed wireless access (FWA) system, which uses directional antennas and forms a wireless mesh network, is an attractive way of providing broadband services because it offers significantly enhanced frequency utilization efficiency and makes service area expansion easy. This paper outlines the mesh-type broadband FWA system and evaluates by computer simulation its frequency utilization efficiency under free-space loss propagation conditions and user station accommodation rates in Shinjuku ward, Tokyo. Results are compared with conventional point-to-multipoint FWA systems. Mesh-type Broadband Fixed Wireless Access System † NTT Network Innovation Laboratories Yokosuka-shi, 239-0847 Japan E-mail: uchida.daisei@lab.ntt. co.jp
An experimental investigation of reconstruction for Condition C in German A′-movement∗

The ungrammaticality of (1) follows if the wh-phrase containing the R-expression John is interpreted in its pre-movement position; thus, it is ruled out by Condition C, just like *Hei likes this picture of Johni. It has been argued that Condition C effects only obtain with arguments, (2a), but not with adjuncts, (2b), the reason being that adjuncts but not arguments can be merged late (viz., after movement):
Using What Students Have at Their Fingertips: Utilising Mobile Phones for Circular Writing

The integration of mobile phones into language teaching is at its infancy due to lack of uniform empirical support and limited studies focusing solely on vocabulary and pronunciation teaching. Arguing that writing should be merited further attention, we targeted a group of 26 English majoring students at a large-size public university in the northeast of Turkey to investigate their attitudes towards mobile phone-integrated language practice in the form of collaborative circular writing outside the school borders and collaborative whole class conferencing in the classroom with a seven-week case study. We gathered the qualitative data via an open-ended questionnaire, and a focus group interview showed that the participants enjoyed the activity as it enabled them to learn new words and structures, enhanced their writing by bringing them a sense of audience and showing them the importance of cohesion and coherence, and helped them know each other better despite the inherent technical problems such as limited storage capacity, credit problems, and group work requirements. It can be concluded that mobile phone can enrich traditional board, pen and pencil language instruction with its interactive nature and the chance to reach information anytime and anywhere if the teacher plans the process carefully and sheds light on the nature and objectives of this integration beforehand.
Convergence analysis of an elitist non-homogeneous genetic algorithm with crossover / mutation probabilities adjusted by a fuzzy controller

In recent years, several attempts to improve the efficiency of the canonical genetic algorithm have been presented. The advantage of the elitist non-homogeneous genetic algorithm is that, variations of the mutation probabilities permit the algorithm to broaden its search space at the start and restrict it later on, however the way in which the mutation probabilities vary is defined before the algorithm is initiated. To solve this problem various types of controllers can be used to adjust such changes. This work presents an elitist non-homogeneous genetic algorithm where the mutation probability is adjusted by a fuzzy controller. Many simulation studies have used fuzzy controllers to adjust the parameters in order to improve the performance of the genetic algorithm. However, no previous investigation has discussed the conditions that must be met by the controller in order to ensure convergence of the genetic algorithm. A generalized example will be used to illustrate how sufficient conditions for the algorithm convergence can be readily achieved. And finally, numerical simulations are used to compare the proposed algorithm with the canonical genetic algorithm.
The amphibians of south-eastern Republic of Guinea

Anteil von Störungsanzeigern (farmbush species) in die be-reits dramatischsten in die Bedeu- tung von Wald-Guinea als eines der artenreichsten Gebiete Afrikas und fordern nachdrücklich einen intensiveren Schutz der verbliebenen Wälder und eine gründliche Untersuchung der vielen endemischen Amphibienarten über die nahezu keine Daten verfügbar ABSTRACT We report on the amphibians of six forest and mountain areas in south-eastern Guinea. Three forest reserves (Déré, Diécké, Mont Béro) have been recently surveyed through a Rapid Assessment Program (RAP), organized by Conservation International. For three other sites (Nimba Mountains, Ziama, Pic de Fon) we reviewed literature records and analyzed specimens from the Museum Koenig collection in Bonn (ZFMK). In total 73 amphibian species have been recorded for south-eastern Guinea. The number of recorded species per area ranged from 29- 58, and the percentage of species endemic to the Upper Guinea forest zone (in total 39 species) from 42-53 %. We discuss several species in more detail. The high number of'farmbush' species, recorded in all areas, is a clear hint of the very degraded nature of the few remaining Guinean forest areas, particularly that of Déré. We emphasize the importance of the whole area as one of Africa's hottest hotspots, strongly recommend increased forest conser- vation activities, and stress the particular need for more detailed field work on the endemic amphibian species.
An Ontology-based Approach for Analyzing Emotions in Software Developers’ Mailing Lists

Emotions are the feelings one has toward various entities. These have always intrigued scholars since early days. With the advancement of information and communication technologies, automated emotion analysis has been in the focus of research community since last decade. This is because people are extensively using online communications for different purposes such as social networking, writing blogs, tweets and product reviews. These online comments are growing enormously due to increasing number of users daily. Therefore, a concern raised by different communities including government, organizations and customers to analyze and explore these online comments for opinion mining and/or emotion analysis purposes. In software industry, software developers generally use forums, mailing lists and discussion groups in order to collaborate among themselves while developing software projects. However, developers may experience challenges such as less effective communications and conflicts during collaborative activities. Hence, this paper addresses to explore these challenges by identifying whether software developers may possess emotions while communicating in discussions. In the previous literature, ontology-based approach has been sparsely explored for emotion analysis, specifically for software developers’ collaborations. For this purpose, an ontology called EmotiOn, is used in order to perform emotion analysis on software developers’ mailing lists. Further, an analyzer is implemented that processes the design ontology. In this study, emails of two projects from archived Apache Software Foundation (ASF) mailing lists were used for analysis purposes. The results showed that 63% of those emails revealed various emotions. This indicates that software developers indeed express emotions through online communications. The analyzer was able to recognize correct emotions with a reasonable accuracy of 61.3%. The precision and recall measures for each of the emotions were recorded and presented in this paper.
INTO LEARNING PROCESS IN A VOCATIONAL SECONDARY SCHOOL IN THE CONTEXT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The paper provides an insight into the results of a lesson designed and carried out at Riga Construction College in the study subject ìBuilding Constructionsî. The aim of this study is to better understand the impact of learning environment reorganisation into juvenile groups while teaching technical study subjects. In particular, the research conducted at this vocational secondary school focused upon introducing a particular form of integrative collaboration amongst the learners. Criteria were developed to respond to the question: How is the organisation of the learning process based on the Learnersí Integrative Collaboration Model changing? A formative teaching experiment, which analyses learnersí integrative collaboration through structured observation at the beginning and end of the acquisition of the study subject ìBuilding Constructionsî points at positive changes associated with the modelís criteria: working in a team, mutual learning, business communication and creativity action.
The Gender Pay Gap in Informal Employment in Poland 1

This paper addresses the issue of the gender pay gap in the formal and informal labour markets in Poland. The authors verify the hypothesis of the existence of a gender pay gap in informal work and compare this gap with the one observed in the formal (registered) labour market. Various analyses of available data show that size and characteristics of gender pay gap differ depending on the level of earnings. The inequality of earnings among unregistered women and men is more pronounced at the bottom tail of the earnings distribution. In the case of formal employees, inequality at the top of the distribution tends to be larger, confirming the existence of a ‘glass ceiling’. The decomposition of the gender pay gap for selected quintiles indicates that it would be even higher if women had men’s characteristics. A possible explanation of the results is the lack of minimum wage regulations in the informal market and the greater flexibility in agreement on wages in the higher quantiles. JEL Classification: J31, O17, J71
Alexithymia and attention deficit and their relationship with disease severity in fibromyalgia syndrome.

Objectives The aim of this study was to investigate the frequency of alexithymia and attention deficit and to evaluate their relationship with the severity of disease in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). Patients and methods A total of 101 patients (6 males, 95 females; mean age 45.0 years; range, 33 to 56 years) who were admitted to Gaziantep University, Medical Faculty, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Department between January 2013 and December 2013 and were diagnosed with FMS and 40 healthy volunteers (4 males, 36 females; mean age 41.5 years; range, 31 to 51 years) were enrolled in this study. The Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ), Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), Toronto Alexithymia Scale-26 (TAS-26), and Jasper-Goldberg Attention Deficit Test (ADT) were applied. Results The rate of alexithymia and possible alexithymia was 56.4% and 20.8% in the patients with FMS and 2.5% and 5% in the control group, respectively. The mean TAS-26 score was 60.1±11.7 in the patients with FMS. According to the HAM-D, depressive symptoms were seen in 72.0% and 2.5% of the patients with FMS and healthy controls, respectively. Conclusion Our study results confirm the presence of psychiatric comorbidities in patients with FMS and clearly suggest that depression, alexithymia, and attention deficit are high and mutually correlated in FMS patients. Therefore, all patients should be meticulously evaluated for these conditions at the treatment stage.
Off-topic English Essay Detection Model Based on Hybrid Semantic Space for Automated English Essay Scoring System

Aiming at the problem that the lack of accurate and efficient off-topic detection model for current Automated English Scoring System in China, an unsupervised off-topic essay detection model based on hybrid semantic space was proposed. Firstly, the essay and its essay prompt are respectively represented as noun phrases by using a neural-network dependency parser. Secondly, we introduce a method to construct a hybrid semantic space. Thirdly, we propose a method to represent the noun phrases of the essay and its prompt as vectors in hybrid semantic space and calculate the similarity between the essay and its prompt by using the noun phrase vectors of them. Finally, we propose a sort method to set the off-topic threshold so that the off-topic essays can be identified efficiently. The experimental results on four datasets totaling 5000 essays show that, compared to the previous off-topic essay detection models, the proposed model can detect off-topic essays with higher accuracy, and the accuracy rate over all essay data sets reaches 89.8%.
Locality and Antilocality: The Logic of Conflicting Requirements

This article discusses what happens when locality requirements—which favor short dependencies—come into conflict with antilocality requirements—which rule out dependencies that are too short. It is argued that in such circumstances, certain locality requirements may be minimally violated so that the antilocality requirement is satisfied. A theory along these lines is shown to derive a pervasive pattern of noniterative symmetry in A-movement—found in Haya and Luganda (Bantu), Tongan (Austronesian), and Japanese—in which the highest two arguments in a domain may undergo A-movement, but A-movement of lower arguments is systematically banned. The article concludes with some discussion of how interactions of this sort might be modeled in the grammar.
FAST MUSIC – AN EFFICIENT IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MUSIC ALGORITHM FOR FREQUENCY ESTIMATION OF APPROXIMATELY PERIODIC SIGNALS

Noise subspace methods are popular for estimating the parameters of complex sinusoids in the presence of uncorrelated noise and has applications in musical instrument modeling and microphone array processing. One such algorithm, MUSIC (Multiple Signal Classification) has been popular for its ability to resolve closely spaced sinusoids. However, the computational efficiency of MUSIC is relatively low, since it requires an explicit eigenvalue decomposition of an autocorrelation matrix, followed by a linear search over a large space. In this paper, we discuss methods for and the benefits of converting the Toeplitz structure of the autocorrelation matrix to circulant form, so that the eigenvalue decomposition can be replaced by a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of one row of the matrix. This transformation requires modeling the signal as at least approximately periodic over some duration. Moreover, we derive a closed-form expression for finding spectral peaks, yielding large savings in computation time. We test our algorithm to resolve closely spaced piano partials and observe that it can work with a much shorter data window than a regular FFT.
Panoramic View Based Monte Carlo Self-localization for Mobile Robots Operating in Real-world Environments

We present a novel panoramic view based robot localization approach which utilizes the Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) [1], a Bayesian filtering technique based on a discrete density representation by means of particles. We show how omidirectional imaging can be combined with the MCL-algorithm to globally localize and track a mobile robot given a taught graph-based representation of the operation area. To demonstrate the reliability of our approach, we present promising experimental results in the context of a challenging robotics application, the self-localization of a mobile service robot acting as shopping assistant in a very regularly structured, maze-like and crowded environment, a home store.
Interleukin-1 b gene polymorphism and its association with chronic periodontitis in South Indian population

Interleukin-1 beta (IL-1b) is a potent inflammatory mediator and an important polymorphism in the locus +3954 (C/T) of the human IL1B gene has been shown to affect the levels of this cytokine. This functional polymorphism has been associated with the establishment of inflammatory diseases, including periodontal disease, in European, Asian and North American populations. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between the IL1B (+3954) gene polymorphism and the occurrence of different clinical forms of periodontitis in South Indian population. This study employed a crosssectional design involving individuals from the State of Tamil Nadu in the Southern region of India. Genomic DNA was obtained from 5 ml of venous blood and amplified using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with specific primers flanking the locus +3954 of IL1B. PCR products were submitted to restriction endonuclease digestion and analyzed by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, to distinguish alleles T and C of the IL1B gene, allowing for the determination of the genotypes and detection of the polymorphism. The chronic periodontitis group displayed a higher percentage of the T allele (28%) than C allele (8.7%). Our data suggested that the polymorphism in the locus +3954 of IL1B gene could be a risk factor for chronic periodontitis in South Indian population.
IOT BASED VEHICLE PARKING ASSISTANCE SYSTEM

With the expansion in vehicle creation and world populace, more parking spots and offices are required. In this paper another stopping framework called Smart Parking System (SPS) is proposed to help drivers to discover empty spaces in an auto park in a shorter time. The new framework utilizes ultrasonic (ultrasound) sensors to identify either auto park inhabitancy or uncalled for stopping activities. Distinctive locations advances are checked on and contrasted with decide the best innovation for creating SPS. Elements of SPS incorporate empty parking spot identification, discovery of disgraceful stopping, showcase of accessible parking spots, and directional pointers toward empty parking spots, instalment offices and distinctive sorts of parking spots. This paper additionally depicts the utilization of a SPS framework from the passageway into a parking garage until the finding of an empty parking spot. The framework is outlined in such a way showing the geological area of the guide in our cell telephone with the assistance of the android application.
Centrality and Partial Correlation Coefficient-Based Assortativity Analysis of Real-World Networks

The assortativity index (A. Index) of a complex network has been hitherto computed as the Pearson’s correlation coefficient of the remaining degree centrality (R-DEG) of the first-order neighbors (i.e. end vertices of the edges) in the network. In this paper, we seek to evaluate the assortativity of real-world networks with respect to prototypical centrality metrics (in addition to R-DEG) such as eigenvector centrality (EVC), betweenness centrality (BWC) and closeness centrality (CLC). Unlike R-DEG, the centrality values of the vertices with respect to these three metrics are influenced by the centrality values of the vertices in the neighborhood. We propose to use the notion of ‘Partial Correlation Coefficient’ to nullify the influence of the second-order neighbors (i.e. vertices that are two hops away) and quantify the assortativity of the first-order neighbors with respect to a particular centrality metric (such as EVC, BWC and CLC). We conduct an exhaustive assortativity analysis on a suite of 70 real-world networks of diverse degree distributions. We observe real-world networks to be more assortative (A. Index > 0) with respect to CLC and EVC and relatively more dissortative (A. Index < 0) with respect to BWC and R-DEG.