Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MODELING FUEL COMMODITIES FORWARD CURVE PRICES

Varo Energy is a company which specializes in international trading, refining, sales, storage and distribution of (bio) fuels. For the two refinery’s Varo requires crude oil for production. The exposure on the margin of the refinery’s is a process which fluctuates through time because of the moving crude and product prices. Varo handles this exposure by hedging the margin of the refineries. Varo wants to understand how this margin behaves. There are two ways to model the margin, the first is modelling the margin as a univariate series and the second is modelling the margin as a multivariate portfolio consisting of all the individual products. This thesis discusses two types of time series models to describe the univariate and multivariate model, the first one are the GARCH models and the second the continues models. For the multivariate model, the interaction between the products is modelled via a vine copula. Both the GARCH and continuous models are used to forecast one month ahead. The accuracy of the multivariate model is better but it does not provide a consistent model. The univariate model is a consistent model but lacks in accuracy. The univariate model is preferred over the multivariate model since the slight increase in accuracy is less important than the consistency of the model. This is because the multivariate model underestimates the volatility of the margin which results in a tight interval which does not capture the full extend of the margin volatility.
Chinese International Students ’ Perspective on Employability---A qualitative study

The employability of university graduates has dominated much educational and economic policy over the past decade (Pegg, et al., 2012). Interestingly, there has been little empirical work exploring the way in which students understand and manage their employability in the context of recent labour market changes (Tomlinson, 2007; Tymon, 2011). As Johnston (2003, 419) argues, one of the limitations of research on graduate employment is its tendency to focus on groups with the potential to influence the government, while ‘the voices of other partners [i.e. international students] in the graduate recruitment process, are deafening in their silence’. Furthermore, existing literature on employability has a strong ‘national' focus on the UK or USA and little reference is made to the increasingly international dimensions of HE and graduate employability (Huang et al., 2014). A review of relevant literature sources, Leonard and Morley (2003) note that there is limited research on the progression and achievement of international students following their graduation and their subsequent careers and motilities. This paper, therefore, examines their perceptions of employability and factors that shape these perceptions. In particular, we focus on their approaches to manage their employability.
Economic Policy Uncertainty and Momentum

We find that news-based measures of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) negatively forecast momentum. A one standard deviation increase in EPU is associated with a 1.11% decrease in risk-adjusted momentum returns. The predictive power of EPU is robust after controlling for previously documented economic state variables and macroeconomic uncertainty. We provide an explanation for these results from the perspective of a fund flow induced trading mechanism and offer direct empirical support. The literature documents that momentum can be partially attributed to performance chasing mutual fund flows. This flow induced mechanism functions more effectively in low EPU states generating stronger stock momentum.
Multimodal SpeakerBeam: Single Channel Target Speech Extraction with Audio-Visual Speaker Clues

Recently, with the advent of deep learning, there has been significant progress in the processing of speech mixtures. In particular, the use of neural networks has enabled target speech extraction, which extracts speech signal of a target speaker from a speech mixture by utilizing auxiliary clue representing the characteristics of the target speaker. For example, audio clues derived from an auxiliary utterance spoken by the target speaker have been used to characterize the target speaker. Audio clues should capture the fine-grained characteristic of the target speaker’s voice (e.g., pitch). Alternatively, visual clues derived from a video of the target speaker’s face speaking in the mixture have also been investigated. Visual clues should mainly capture the phonetic information derived from lip movements. In this paper, we propose a novel target speech extraction scheme that combines audio and visual clues about the target speaker to take advantage of the information provided by both modalities. We introduce an attention mechanism that emphasizes the most informative speaker clue at every time frame. Experiments on mixture of two speakers demonstrated that our proposed method using audio-visual speaker clues significantly improved the extraction performance compared with the conventional methods using either audio or visual speaker clues.
SpeechMarker: A Voice Based Multi-Level Attendance Application

This work describes a multi-level speaker verification (SV) framework that is accessible via a graphical user interface (GUI) with attendance as an application. This framework has three different modalities of SV system, namely, voice-password, textdependent and text-independent. The decision for attendance marking can be taken from each of the modalities or by fusion. There are two operating modes of the developed GUI, which are user and debug modes. The user mode is for general users to mark attendance, whereas the debug mode is to study the behavior of the three modalities from deployment point of view. The speech waveforms, different plots and scores can be analyzed in the debug mode for analysis. The system has been deployed successfully for regular attendance marking among a closed group in a laboratory environment.
ffi cient Breadth-First Search on the Cell / B . E . Processor

Multi-core processors are a shift of paradigm in computer architecture that promises a dramatic increase in performance. But they also bring an unprecedented level of complexity in algorithmic design and software development. In this paper we describe the challenges involved in designing a Breadth-First Search (BFS) algorithm for the Cell/B.E. processor. The proposed methodology combines a high-level algorithmic design that captures the machine-independent aspects, to guarantee portability with performance to future processors, with an implementation that embeds processor-specific optimizations. Using a fine-grained global coordination strategy derived by the Bulk-Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model, we have determined an accurate performance model that has guided the implementation and the optimization of our algorithm. Our experiments show an almost-linear scaling over the number of used synergistic processing elements in the Cell/B.E. platform, and compares favorably against other systems. On graphs which offer sufficient parallelism, the Cell/B.E. is typically an order of magnitude faster than conventional processors such as the AMD Opteron and the Intel Pentium 4 and Woodcrest, and custom-designed architectures, such as the MTA-2 and BlueGene/L.
The Effect of Xanthan, Guar and Transglutaminase on the Physicochemical and Textural Properties of Gluten-free Doughnut

The main objective of the current study was to optimize gluten free doughnuts formula for which the effect of xanthan, guar and Transglutaminase (TGase) enzyme were investigated. Xanthan, Guar and TGase were added from 0 to 2% of flour basis to the basic formula. Treatments were designed based on the mixture design of the Minitab software. The optimum conditions were selected based on the oil absorption, hardness, color, porosity and specific volume. The results showed that the high oil absorption occurred at the high level of TGase in absence of gums and the minimum oil absorption happened at the triple point. TGase caused cross linkage between rice flour protein, potato flour protein, and soy protein concentrate, which led to making protein network, xanthan gum,creating viscoelastic properties and guar gum,generating inter-surface properties, finally resulting in the increase of porosity and specific volume of doughnuts respectively. The interaction between the components showed that increasing the amount of guar gum improved the lightness of doughnuts. Texture parameters showed that samples with just gums without TGase showed the highest hardness. The synergistic effects of these gums increased viscosity. Hardness was decreased by protein network induced by TGase. The results of this study showed that the formula containing all three components could simulate the protein network in the gluten-free doughnut. The optimum point was 0.98% of xanthan, 0.44% of guar and 0.58% TGase which showed the best responds.
econstor Make Your Publications Visible . A Service of zbw

Plummeting commodity prices, China’s economic slowdown and rebalancing, and global financial market turbulence have recently raised concerns about their effects on African economies. This paper investigates whether, and to what extent, these intertwined shocks spillover into the Tanzanian economy. The author finds that a 1 percentage point (ppts) drop in China’s investment growth is associated with a decline in Tanzania’s export growth of roughly 0.60 ppts. A 1 percent fall in commodity prices leads to 0.65 percent lower exports value. The results suggest that a hard landing of the Chinese economy to its ‘new normal’ would doubtless send shock waves through the Tanzanian economy by further driving down commodity demand and prices as well as lowering development finance. In contrast, financial market volatility has a fairly negligible impact on economic growth. The main results stand up well to a wide-array of robustness checks.
Validity and Reliability Instrumen of Noble Character of Adolescence

The instrument of noble character is arranged to get a valid and reliable instrument that can measure the noble character of students in Islamic Senior High School. The research method uses a survey, with the number of testing respondents as many as 597 students, using a Likert scale model. Instrument testing begins with a theoretical validity test by 4 experts and 20 panel members by examining the instrument items. Experts analyzes qualitatively, after the instrument is corrected as suggested by expert advice. Then it is examined by a panel that analyzes quantitatively using the Aiken index of 69 items, 17 indicators and 4 dimensions. The results of the analysis show that all items are valid. The next step is empirical validity test, where analysis of measurement model uses Confirmatory Analysis Factor (CFA) with Lisrel 8.80 Full Version program. The test results show 62 items valid, with criteria of SLF value ≥ 0.30 and t-value ≥ 1.96, and calculating reliability with construct Reliability (CR), the calculated results are reliable with CR> 0.70. From the observation of the model compatibility test towards the noble character instrument, it can be concluded that there is a match between the theoretical and empirical models.
A Dynamic Co-attention Network for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation is the task of recommending the next item a user might be interested in given partially known session information, e.g., part of a session or recent historical sessions. An effective session-based recommender should be able to exploit a user's evolving preferences, which we assume to be a mixture of her short- and long-term interests. Existing session-based recommendation methods often embed a user's long-term preference into a static representation, which plays a fixed role when dealing with her current short-term interests. This is problematic because long-term preferences may be more or less important for predicting the next conversion depending on the user's short-term interests. We propose a DCN-SR. DCN-SR applies a co-attention network to capture the dynamic interactions between the user's long- and short-term interaction behavior and generates co-dependent representations of the user's long- and short-term interests. For modeling a user's short-term interaction behavior, we design a CGRU network to take actions like "click'', "collect'' and "buy'' into account. Experiments on e-commerce datasets show significant improvements of DCN-SR over state-of-the-art session-based recommendation methods, with improvements of up to 2.58% on the Tmall dataset and 3.08% on the Tianchi dataset in terms of Recall@10. MRR@10 improvements are 3.78% and 4.05%, respectively. We also investigate the scalability and sensitivity of DCN-SR. The improvements of DCN-SR over state-of-the-art baselines are especially noticeable for short sessions and active users with many historical interactions.
Degradation of pHEMT performance in BiHEMTs caused by thermal history during HBT growth and suggestions for improvement

ABSTRACT The use of BiHEMTs, the integration of HBT & pHEMT, have resulted in high efficiency PAs. The mobility of the pHEMT in the BiHEMT structure was lower compared to simple pHEMTs in the development stage. It was found at careful investigation that Si from the delta-doped electron supply layer diffused into the InGaAs channel layer during HBT epitaxial growth. High mobility was obtained in the pHEMT by changing from delta doping to uniform doping.
The study of factors influencing computer adoption in East Java on-farm agribusiness

This paper seeks to investigate the factors that influence computer adoption in East Java On-Farm Agribusiness and the implications for sustainable agricultural development. A mixed method of semi-structured interviews and mail surveys was employed to maximise response rate. The conceptual framework and theoretical insights presented are based on the review of literature, with primary data collected from a broad range of agribusinesses in East Java. To develop quantitative information of sample characteristics, a multi-variate analysis has been employed. Logistic regression has also been used to test the research hypothesis. The research produced the research finding that the probability of adopting computers for agribusiness is strongly influenced by manager’s age, education and gross sales. This research has direct implication on agribusiness development for East Java and other provinces in Indonesia. It aims to encourage other researchers to do benchmarking with other developing countries based on this research. The complexity and wide range of agribusinesses in East Java made the research methodology complicated. This investigation of the factors influencing computer adoption contributes to the Indonesian agribusiness model of development.
Oceanographic habitat and the coral microbiomes of urban-impacted reefs

Coral reefs are in decline worldwide. In response to this habitat loss, there are efforts to grow, outplant, and restore corals in many regions. The physical oceanographic habitat of corals—such as sea temperature, waves, ocean currents, and available light—is spatially heterogeneous. We therefore hypothesize that outplant location may affect microbiomes, and ultimately, coral health and restoration success. We evaluated the influence of the physical oceanographic habitat on microbes in wild Porites astreoides and Siderastrea siderea. Tissue samples were collected at four Florida reefs in March, June, and September of 2015. We estimated oceanographic conditions from moored instruments, diver observations, remote sensing data, and numerical models. We analyzed microbiomes using amplicon 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing data. We found microbial alpha-diversity negatively correlated with in situ sea temperature (which represented both the annual cycle and upwelling), as well as modeled alongshore currents, in situ sea-level, and modeled tide. Microbial beta-diversity correlated positively with significant wave height and alongshore currents from models, remotely-sensed relative turbidity, and in situ temperature. We found that archaea from the order Marine Group II decrease with increases in significant wave height, suggesting that this taxon may be influenced by waves. Also, during times of high wave activity, the relative abundance of bacteria from the order Flavobacteriales increases, which may be due to resuspension and cross-shelf transport of sediments. We also found that bacteria from the order SAR86 increase in relative abundance with increased temperature, which suggests that this taxon may play a role in the coral microbiome during periods of higher temperature. Overall, we find that physical oceanographic variability correlates with the structure of these coral microbiomes in ways that could be significant to coral health.
LEA-WP 0702 THE EFFECTS OF SEGREGATION AND SPATIAL MISMATCH ON UNEMPLOYMENT : EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

In this paper, we investigate how residential segregation and bad physical access to jobs contribute to urban unemployment in the Paris region. We first survey the general mechanisms according to which residential segregation and spatial mismatch can have adverse labor-market outcomes. We then discuss the extent of the problem with the help of relevant descriptive statistics computed from the 1999 Census of the Population and from the 2000 General Transport Survey. Finally, we estimate the effect of indices of segregation computed at the neighborhood and municipality levels, as well as job accessibility indices on the labor-market transitions out of unemployment using the 1990-2002 Labor Force Survey. Our results show that neighborhood segregation is a key factor that prevents unemployed workers from finding a job. These results are robust to potential location endogeneity biases.
Geographical variation of the merging between dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin

This study investigates the geographical distribution of pronunciation variation of voiceless dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin. Previous studies indicated that the merging of the two sibilants is geographically dependent [17, 6]. However, the geographical effects in these studies are not easy to interpret due to the limited number of speakers and regions. For the current study, we recruited 331 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin from 120 regions in Taiwan. In a picture-naming task, 30 dental/retroflex-initial words were elicited from each speaker. The data were analysed with Generalized Additive Mixed models [26]. The analysis revealed a robust effect of geographical location, with merging being less common in metropolitan cities as compared to the surrounding areas.
Design and analysis of a Dual band Monopole Antenna for resonating between Wi-Fi & WiMax Applications

In the proposed work, a dual band antenna has been designed, simulated and fabricated on a Rogers (RT/Duroid 5880tm) substrate of permittivity 2.2 and thickness 1.6mm for resonating between Wi-Fi and Wi-Max. The novely of the work lies in using two conducting strips that are mutually perpendicular to each other loaded with a partial ground plane. The proposed structure resulted in a peak Gain of 7.62dB and 5.75dB for the lower and the upper frequency bands respectively.
V Methods for the Analysis of CCRC Data

This paper presents an approach to analyzing continuing care retirement community (CCRC) data and demonstrates the methodology by using data from a CCRC. It is assumed that residents make "transitions" among a number of "states" that represent the levels of care required by residents. There is randomness associated with both the transition times and the states entered at these times. The model is conveniently characterized in terms of "transition intensity functions," which represent the instantaneous rates of transition between pairs of states. Statistical methods for estimating these functions are discussed, and estimates are obtained from the dataset. A simulation approach for determining probabilities and other interesting quantities based on the estimated intensity functions is also described and illustrated.
Kinematics and Jacobian Analysis of the KNTU CDRPM : A Cable Driven Redundant Parallel Manipulator

KNTU CDRPM is a cable driven redundant parallel manipulator, which is under investigation for possible implementation in large workspace applications. This type newly developed manipulator has numerous advantages compared to that of the conventional parable mechanisms. The rotational motion range is relatively large, the inherent redundancy improves dexterity of the manipulator, and the light weight structure makes the robot more energy efficient and significantly fast. However, there exist some challenging issues in the over-constrained mechanism like KNTU CDRPM. Collision avoidance, force feasibility, and linear independency of the cables are the main issues being under study in the design of such manipulators. In this paper, singularity of the KNTU CDRPM is studied in detail. To extract kinematic properties of the robot, the inverse and forward kinematics are analyzed. It is shown that singularity analysis can well describe the characteristics of the design and provide the sufficient means to the designer to improve these characteristics. Finally, a suitable design strategy is proposed to significantly reduce the singularity of the manipulator within its whole workspace. The outcomes of this strategy implemented on KNTU CDRPM result in a significant improvement of the singular free workspace of the proposed design compared to that of the latest parallel manipulators.
Academicians' Acceptance of Online Learning Environments: A Review of Information System Theories and Models

Aim of this paper is to review technology (IS) acceptance theories and models, recognizing empirical evidence available to support the suitability of each theoretical model in explaining academicians’ acceptance of online learning technology. Understanding the factors influencing system usage is crucial for decision-makers to recognize potential user needs and concerns, which could be addressed during the development phase of a system. Thus, for decades, researchers have been trying to understand why people accept new technologies. As a result, a wide variety of theories and models explaining the concept of technology acceptance. Some prominent theoretical models explaining technology acceptance are, “Theory of Reasoned Action”, “Diffusion of Innovation theory”, “Theory of Planned Behavior”, “Social Cognitive Theory”, “Technology Acceptance Model”, “Model of PC Utilization”, “Motivational Model”, “Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology”, “UTAUT 2”, “UTAUT 3”. The concept of academic’s acceptance of online learning technology can be explained through several determinants that are operationalized through above information systems models.
A fuzzy model for quality evaluation processes

This paper describes an application of fuzzy set theory to real problems. These problems refer to concepts, policies, strategies and techniques of quality systems of industrial and services organizations. The paper focuses on the quality evaluation process used to verify if the quality level of productive processes, products, services and general resources (mainly human resources) are reaching better values. The parameters and criteria from the National Brazilian Quality Award are used as a reference. Basic concepts of fuzzy set theory were applied to these concepts and criteria. So it was possible to define a more adequate way to evaluate almost 40,000 organizations, which are submitted, annually, to the evaluation process to conquer the Award. The obtained results show the theoretical and practical adjustment of fuzzy sets to quality systems and quality evaluation processes. Key-Words: Fuzzy set applications; Quality management; Quality