Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Issues in Information Systems

Since small and medium businesses constitute the vast majority of businesses in our economy and the most number of jobs that go with it, it is necessary for those businesses to become more innovative and competitive through the use of information technology (IT). Given that a multitude of business drivers and factors can influence the adoption of IT by small and medium businesses, it is important to investigate the multidimensional nature of the factors and barriers to help these businesses realize what they are doing right and what is holding them back from becoming more innovative and competitive through use of IT. This study adds to the body of knowledge on adoption of IT by small and medium businesses by proposing a research model that focuses on the impact the firms’ quality orientation, efficiency consciousness, availability of resources, and selected CEO characteristics can have on its IT investments. The research model is being validated through a questionnaire-based survey, which is in progress now. Therefore, this study is a work-in-progress. Currently data has been collected and preliminary data analysis has been done and reported here. When completed, the study is expected to provide valuable insights to important and common barriers faced by small businesses in adopting IT thus helping them to realize how to move forward to become more competitive and innovative.
Existential consumption and irrational desire

In postmodernity, consumption is a prime site for the negotiation of conflicting themes of freedom and control. Explores the consumption of symbolic meaning through five consumption dialectics: the material versus the symbolic, the social versus the self, desire versus satisfaction, rationality versus irrationality, and creativity versus constraint. Argues that consumers are engaged in authentic choices in the construction and communication of self and social meanings, and that these consumption choices can be conceptualized as the exercise of existential freedom, even if constrained by inequalities in the economic system and by ideological hegemony.
Introducing quick sleeping using the broadcast channel for 3GPP LTE MTC

The world is advancing towards Internet of Things (IoT) where various types of devices communicate and share data with each other. The communication between the devices are enabled and controlled through Machine Type Communications (MTC). MTC has a wide range of applications and forms an integral part of IoT. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization body has recognized the potential for MTC and is currently working on standardizing the specifications and deployment of MTC services as part of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The system requirements of these MTC devices are different from the regular devices using the LTE network. Many MTC devices are expected to be low cost, low data rate and delay tolerant. One of the challenges in MTC using 3GPP LTE is to reduce the power consumption of the User Equipment (UE) in order to prolong their battery life. The power consumption of a UE is directly proportional to its processing time. In this paper, we introduce quick sleeping to the current 3GPP LTE MTC framework. First, we compare the quick sleeping mechanism with the present Discontinuous Reception (DRX) mechanism for sleeping in LTE and show that there can be significant savings in the UE processing time if quick sleeping is adopted. Then we present different methods to incorporate quick sleeping into the Physical Broadcast Channel (PBCH) with minimal changes to the current LTE standard. The impact of these quick sleeping solutions on PBCH Block Error Rate (BLER) performance is also discussed.
An Evaluation of the 1977 Canadian Firearms Legislation

This article uses a pooled cross-section, time-series model to evaluate the effect of the 1977 Canadian firearms legislation on the provincial homicide rate between 1969 and 1989. This type of model was selected because of its ability to capture variation across space as well as time. The indices included in this model, measured at the provincial level, as independent variables are: unemployment rate, percentage Status Indian, percentage immigrant, percentage male youth, the clearance rate. The results are consistent with the findings of most previous studies that the 1977 Canadian firearms legislation did not have a significant effect on homicide rates. The strongest explanatory factors were percentage Status Indian and male youth.
Botanical urbanism: a new project for the botanical garden at the University of Puerto Rico

Abstract For those who are neither botanists nor avid admirers of horticulture, plants and flowers, the topic of the botanical garden in the context of our media-saturated twenty-first century might at first seem a little antiquated — more a specialist subject for eccentric gardeners and historians perhaps. Conjuring up a medley of exotic images — endless parterres with strange Latin names, shapely Colonial lawns with ubiquitous white structures, colourful summertime flower displays, tropical glasshouses and unusual specimens, each carefully labelled with imprinted metal tags or bronze plaques — botanical gardens are today mostly tourist curiosities and emblems of bygone empires. Whereas many contemporary botanical gardens around the world are striving to find renewed vitality through conservation, education and scientific research programmes, visitorship and revenue continue to decline in most cases. Is the botanical garden as a significant cultural place obsolete today, or at least outmoded in the face of modem science, technology, media and globalisation? Or is there scope for reinvention of the botanical garden as a cultural type somehow newly popular and relevant for the twenty-first-century imagination?
Devanagari Hand-printed Character Recognition using Multiple Features and Multi-stage Classifier

Devanagari is an important script mostly used in South Asia and it is also the script of Hindi the mothertongue of majority of Indians. Though work done for the recognition of Devanagari hand-printed characters have been reported by some authors, but the availability of good ICR for this script is still a dream. In this paper, a three tier strategy is suggested to recognize the handprinted characters of this script. In primary and secondary stage classification, the structural properties of the script are exploited to avoid classification error. The results of all the three stages are reported on two classifiers i.e. MLP and SVM and the results achieved with the later are very good. The performance of the proposed scheme is reported in respect of recognition accuracy and time. The recognition rate achieved with the proposed scheme is 94.2% on our database consisting of more than 25000 characters belonging to 43 alphabets. The recognition rate has further improved to 95.3% when a conflict resolution strategy between some pair of characters is used.
Dynamic behavior of gamma-irradiated polycarbonate

The aim of the present work was to establish the relationship between dynamic behavior of Bisphenol A polycarbonate (BAPC) and degradation by gamma irradiation. The BAPC was exposed to 340 kGy dose and the molecular weight was evaluated by Size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC). A modified split Hopkinson pressure bar was used to measure stress-strain dynamic relations. The results showed little change in the dynamic behavior of irradiated BAPC in the highest strain rate used in this work, in spite of the high decrease in the molecular weight of irradiated BAPC. The lowest strain rate used in this work produced the highest change in the dynamic behavior of irradiated BAPC.
The generalized higher order singular value decomposition and the oriented signal-to-signal ratios of pairs of signal tensors and their use in signal processing

Abstr act − Two new gener alizations of tenso r conce pts for signa l proce ssing are prese nted. These gener ali-zatio ns are typic ally relev ant for appli cations where one tenso r consi sts of valua ble measu red data or signa ls, that shoul d be retai ned, while the secon d tenso r conta ins data or information that shoul d be rejec ted. First the highe r order singu lar value decomposition for a singl e tenso r is exten ded to pairs of tenso rs; this is the multi linear equiv alent of the gener alized or quoti ent SVD (GSVD, QSVD) for pairs of matri ces. Next the notio n of orien ted signa l-to-signa l ratio s that was deriv ed for pairs of matri ces is exten ded to pairs of tenso rs. These signa l to signa l ratio s can be linke d to the previ ously defin ed gener alized highe r order singu lar value decomposition. 1 INTRODUCTION In recen t years more and more instances of appli cations occur, where the data have more than two indices and hence are not organ ized in a matri x but in a tenso r, also called a multi way or multi dimensional array. Let us menti on here psych ometrics [16], chemometrics [7, 8, 15, 17] and stati stical signal and image processing [6, 9, 10, 18]. In typical image appli cations, the 4 different indices of a 4 th order image tenso r can be the x, y, t and color axes. A recen t appli cation is the websearch tenso r. Here we will mainl y work in a signal processing, but many concepts can be carri ed over to the other domai ns. Typically the metho ds of matri x theory and relat ed numerical compu tations [1] are no longer adequ ate and valuable for tenso rs. Therefore a number of studi es [10-1 4, 19-20 ] have been perfo rmed to exten d some matri x concepts to tenso rs, like the higher order singu lar value decom position or the canon ical decom position of a tenso r. Also the use of tenso rs for findi ng indep endent compo nents [9] in signals is a topic of current interest. Many appli cations occur where the measu red data lead …
COLOR DYNAMICS OF THE PUPIL

In 1960, we observed what appeared to be paradoxical contractions of the pupil in response to flashes of darkness. This led to a description of the essential dynamic asymmetry of the pupil reflex and a delineation of a prominent, light intensitysensitive component of pupillary behavior which we called the rate-sensitive contraction response. '-3 This response is contrasted with the less prominent, slower dilation in response to decreasing light. In our subsequent investigation of the effects of changes of color, rather than light intensity alone, upon pupillary behavior, it was to be expected that such a rate-sensitive pupillary contraction would occur for each change in color, since an increase in stimulation occurs a t different color receptors of the retina for these changes. Such increases in stimulation would not be canceled by a decrease of stimulus in other portions of the retina, in accordance with the principle of unidirectional rate sensitivity. These predictions are confirmed by experiments reported here. It was also predicted that pupillary oscillations could be obtained solely by changing color in response to a change in pupil diameter, without a change in intensity. Such oscillations were, in fact, readily obtained and are reported here. During the course of these experiments, however, a paradoxical pupillary contraction was newly observed in response to a step removal of a color component of the light stimulus. We call it "paradoxical contraction" because a reduction of the light intensity within the same color results in pupillary dilation. This new paradoxical contraction has the general characteristics of a rate-sensitive pupillary contraction, although of smaller amplitude than the contraction of the pupil produced by a flash of light. The phenomenon may be explained by a theory of mutual inhibition of colors. Removal of a color component removes its inhibiting effect on the remaining colors and, in effect, enhances them. The increase constitutes the stimulus for the rate-sensitive contraction. Results of experiments showing the relationship between inhibition and excitation are described in this paper. The newly observed pardoxical contraction may also be of value in observing some gross quantitative relations between inhibition and excitation in the nervous system.
Spatial contextual classification and prediction models for mining geospatial data

Modeling spatial context (e.g., autocorrelation) is a key challenge in classification problems that arise in geospatial domains. Markov random fields (MRF) is a popular model for incorporating spatial context into image segmentation and land-use classification problems. The spatial autoregression (SAR) model, which is an extension of the classical regression model for incorporating spatial dependence, is popular for prediction and classification of spatial data in regional economics, natural resources, and ecological studies. There is little literature comparing these alternative approaches to facilitate the exchange of ideas. We argue that the SAR model makes more restrictive assumptions about the distribution of feature values and class boundaries than MRF. The relationship between SAR and MRF is analogous to the relationship between regression and Bayesian classifiers. This paper provides comparisons between the two models using a probabilistic and an experimental framework.
Trusted storage

We study the properties, design, implementation and performance of trusted storage, an architecture that ensures the integrity, confidentiality and accountability of data, by enforcing storage policies at the lowest layer of a storage system, within the hardware and firmware of disk enclosures. The guarantees provided by trusted storage depend only on the integrity and correctness of the trusted device/enclosure firmware and hardware, not on the absence of bugs and security vulnerabilities in any higher level software of a system and operator error or malice. Trusted storage primitives enable applications to associate and enforce a policy with each data object they create, and to obtain firmware-generated, cryptographically signed certificates, which attest to a given stored data object’s name and content hash, the policy in effect for the object, access history for the object, as well as certain properties of the device including its approximate location. A typical policy states the conditions under which a data object may be read, updated, or deleted, to what extent access to the object should be recorded, how often the object should be scrubbed, and the conditions under which the policy may be changed. To implement this functionality, each trusted storage device has a globally unique identifier and a unique hardware-protected asymmetric cryptographic private key, whose corresponding public key is certified by the manufacturer. Using this private key, the device can cryptographically sign messages, generate short-term session keys and establish secure connections to other trusted storage devices, trusted servers (e.g. time, location, firmware update) and client computers by tunnelling securely through the (untrusted) operating system. Trusted storage addresses the problems created by two complementary trends in computing. On the one hand, both the volume and the value of digitally stored data
Pre-school phonological awareness and subsequent literacy development

Abstract There is an unresolved debate in the developmental literature regarding whether phonemic awareness is acquired naturally as part of phonological awareness, or whether it is instead an artefact of reading tuition. This ambiguity affects the interpretation of studies which show that pre‐literate phonemic awareness is a powerful predictor of literacy attainment in school. There is also evidence to suggest that spoken word recognition might contribute to literacy development. The present study therefore initially assessed 30 preschool, pre‐literate children on a battery of tests designed to provide a profile of pre‐literate phonological awareness. The reading and spelling ability of these children was then monitored at the end of each school term for five terms. Results suggest that young children can develop phonemic awareness before beginning reading or attending school, and that children's pre‐literate rhyme detection ability is the best predictor of initial reading development. Spoken word recogn.
Development of Factor Scales for the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery-Children's Revision

Factor scales to be used in the interpretation of the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery-Children's Revision (LNNB-CR) were derived. The protocols from 719 children (240 normal, 253 brain impaired, 32 suspected brain impaired, 39 learning disabled, 5 leukemic, and 150 psychiatric) were utilized. Factors from overall and individual scale analyses were compared, and only those demonstrating adequate internal consistency and reasonable independence of the clinical scales were retained. This resulted in a final set of 11 internally consistent, largely nonredundant factors. Suggestions for factor scale interpretation and comparison of the LNNB-CR factors with those found on other measures were made.
Children's Independent Spatial Mobility in the Urban Public Realm

This article examines children's spatial mobility in urban settings. Through data from a study of children living in contrasting urban environments, London and a lower-density new town, the article focuses on how children move around in the public realm. The data show that there are significant variations in how contemporary children use their public spaces. Children's freedom to move around their neighbourhood was greatest in the new town. Girls and minority ethnic children were more restricted in their use of urban space. Comparison with previous research suggests a decrease in independent use of public space for 10/11-year-old English children since the 1970s. It is argued that future debate about children's place in the city should move away from `the unitary public child'. Lack of attention to the different ways children use their cities will hinder advances in social policies designed to enhance participation for all children.
An Experimental Study of Passive UHF RFID System with Longer Communication Range

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems are useful for reducing costs in supply chains. The communication range between the reader and the tag is one of the most important points in the application of RFID to supply chain management. We present results of experiments conducted on our passive RFID prototype system that we designed with the aim of increasing the communication range. It uses an intermittent transmission method to reduce the power consumption of the tag IC. Our results show that the power consumption was reduced to about three-quarters by using intermittent transmission with a duty ratio of 40%. Our experimental results indicate that optimization of the transmitting signal is effective for saving power consumption at tag IC and increasing the communication range.
Optimal Power Control for D2D Communications under Rician Fading: A Risk Theoretical Approach

Device-to-device communication is a technology that allows users in close proximity to establish a direct communication link instead of passing through the base station. Because direct communications are likely to have a strong line- of- sight component in the received signal, it is reasonable to model the direct channel with Rician fading. In this paper, we propose a power- control scheme for device-to-device communications on a shared channel. Our allocation minimizes the total power consumption while limiting the link outage probability due to Rician fast fading. By leveraging the concept of conditional-value-at-risk from the field of finance, we obtain a linear programming formulation which can be efficiently solved. Through simulation results we show the benefit of the proposed power allocation compared to a deterministic power control that does not account for the random channel variations. Moreover, we provide insights into how the network topology and the parameter settings affect the performance and feasibility of the power allocation.
A convex optimisation based approach to PI-controller tuning for time invariant integrator and low order lag plus delay plants

This paper addresses the problem of proportional integral (PI) feed-back-controller tuning to minimise control performance indices (CPI). We consider regulator tuning for stable and unstable low order lag and integrator plants with and without delay. Common CPIs such as the integrated absolute error (IAE) are used as objective functions to be minimised by parameter tuning. Many of these CPIs are convex functions if their domain can be shown to be convex, which guarantees that a CPI minimum found by tuning is the global minimum. We find a convex representation of the domain for fixed structure parameter tuning, by utilising the fact that CPIs merely characterise input-output behaviour of transfer functions, which allows for a relaxation of structural constraints. This is shown to introduce convexity of the set of stabilising controller parameters as a necessity and techniques to show this for the considered plants are proposed. Furthermore, a computational simple iterative algorithm that exploits convexity to solve the tuning problem to its global optimal controller parameters is shown. To illustrate the potential of the proposed approach, we show IAE minimal tuning of a PI controller for a simulated first order lag plus delay plant using the proposed algorithm and compare the results with classical tuning rules destined for IAE minimisation.
Early food refusal: Infant and family characteristics

Le but de cette etude fut la comparaison de nourrissons ayant commence a refuse de manger durant leur premiere annee a un groupe controle, la comparaison s'effectuant sur l'alimentation, le pattern de developpement, la situation familiale et les caracteristiques du comportement du nourrisson. Les nourrissons refusant de manger pesaient relativement moins au debut de l'etude et au suivi, a l'âge de deux ans. Le refus de manger etait aussi associe a des problemes de sevrage, des rapports faits par les parents de moindre consommation de nourriture, les problemes psycho-sociaux dans la famille, des perceptions moins positives du parentage, des nourrissons difficiles et des comportements problematiques. Les resultats ont des implications pour l'identification et la comprehension de facteurs lies au refus de manger precoce
Creative clusters and city growth

Abstract Inspired by US management guru Michael Porter (1995) the City Growth Strategy initiative is promoting business clusters as a means of encouraging the regeneration of deprived inner city areas in the UK. This paper draws on an ongoing evaluation of one of the initial pilots for this initiative — the City Fringe area of London where six creative clusters are being targeted as a means of stimulating local economic development and social inclusion. Drawing on baseline research with the jewellery cluster the paper explores the degree to which this cluster gains competitive advantage from its inner city location and the extent to which it is able to contribute to the regeneration of the local area. It thus provides a critique of Porter's theory and contributes to our understanding of the extent to which creative clusters can act as a tool for inner city regeneration.
Hypoglycemic Activity of Artemisia herba-alba (Asso.) used in Egyptian Traditional Medicine as Hypoglycemic Remedy

In vitro and In vivo screening of hypoglycemic activity of Artemisia herba-alba (Asso.) herbs emphasized its activity in hypoglycemic remedy. Further investigation on fractions of 70% ethyl alcohol extract of Artemisia herba-alba (Asso.) herbs revealed that the ethyl alcohol extract produces hypoglycemic effect more than any of its fractions. Four compounds were isolated and identified from fractions of 70% ethyl alcohol extract of Artemisia herba-alba (Asso.) herbs. These compounds were previously reported for their hypoglycemic activity.