Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Entrepreneurial Engagements: Its Motivations and Challenges Among Undergraduate Students of Nsukka Arts School in Nigeria

ABSTRACT:This study addresses the experiences of undergraduate entrepreneurs, including what motivates them, their challenges, and how they navigate both entrepreneurial activities and academic work. Using a snowball approach, a qualitative research design involving fifteen purposively selected respondents from among the sculpture students of the Nsukka Art School was used as a case study. Data collection and analysis were conducted using a semi-structured interview and a thematic analysis approach, respectively. Findings show that respondents are actively involved in entrepreneurial deeds within multiple non-sculpture related fields such as painting, graphic, communication design, T-shirt printing, portrait making, and utility wood sculptures. They are motivated by the quest to address personal financial constraints. Such entrepreneurial quests, however, expose them to specialization and operational, marketing, and managerial challenges. It is recommended that policymakers in academia, industry, and government work together toward repositioning student entrepreneurs by creating the enabling environment for economic growth. While a further study is needed to understand how undergraduates navigate their managerial challenges, the nuanced performance and difference in age and gender is noteworthy.
A factorisation procedure for two by two matrix functions on the circle with two rationally independent entries

Synopsis The aim of this paper is the explicit canonical or standard factorisation of matrix functions with Wiener algebra elements. The present approach covers all regular 2 × 2 matrices where two entries are arbitrary and the remaining two are linear combinations of the former with rational coefficient functions. It is based on the knowledge of how to factorise scalar functions and rational matrix functions. In general, one also needs the approximation of any scalar Wiener algebra function with a rational function. However, this can be easily circumvented in many applications by intuitive manipulations with rational matrix functions.
New Intersections in the United States

ABSTRACT:This essay introduces a special issue of Nova Religio on magic and politics in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The articles in this issue address a gap in the literature examining intersections of religion, magic, and politics in contemporary North America. They approach political magic as an essentially religious phenomenon, in that it deals with the spirit world and attempts to motivate human behavior through the use of symbols. Covering a range of practices from the far right to the far left, the articles argue against prevailing scholarly treatments of the use of esoteric technologies as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, showing how they have also been operationalized by the left in recent history. They showcase the creativity of magic as a form of human cultural expression, and demonstrate how magic coexists with rationality in contemporary western settings.
Marginal nonparametric kernel regression accounting for within‐subject correlation

There has been substantial recent interest in non- and semiparametric methods for longitudinal or clustered data with dependence within clusters. It has been shown rather inexplicably that, when standard kernel smoothing methods are used in a natural way, higher efficiency is obtained by assuming independence than by using the true correlation structure. It is shown here that this result is a natural consequence of how standard kernel methods incorporate the within-subject correlation in the asymptotic setting considered, where the cluster sizes are fixed and the cluster number increases. In this paper, an alternative kernel smoothing method is proposed. Unlike the standard methods, the smallest variance of the new estimator is achieved when the true correlation is assumed. Asymptotically, the variance of the proposed method is uniformly smaller than that of the most efficient working independence approach. A small simulation study shows that significant improvement is obtained for finite samples. Copyright Biometrika Trust 2003, Oxford University Press.
Green's Function of Vertical Multi-layer Soil

Theoretical derivation complexity and numerical analysis complication are two main difficulties in Green's function of vertical multi-layer soil.In order to overcome these difficulties,the symbolic equation method was presented as derivation method of Green's function and the self-adapting high-accuracy complex image method was used to get numerical solution of Green's function.Based on image transform and separation of variable method,the symbolic equation method was used as mechanized derivation method.The generalized closed form expression of Green's function can be obtained without artificial derivation.By the intellectualized two-times-sampling method,numerical result of Green's function was obtained.Then the matrix pencil method and the complex image method were utilized to approximate Green's function.Because of the improvement on computational efficiency and precision,the self-adapting high-accuracy complex image method can be used as a substitution for Prony's method or generalized pencil-of-function method.Checked by calculation example,these methods are accurate and effective for horizontal and vertical multi-layer soil.
Ultrafast laser inscription of 3D components for spatial multiplexing

The thirst for bandwidth in telecommunications networks is becoming ever larger due to bandwidth hungry applications such as video-on-demand. To further increase the bandwidth capacity, engineers are now seeking to imprint information on the last remaining degree of freedom of the lightwave carrier – space. This has given rise to the field of Space Division Multiplexing (SDM). In essence, the concept of SDM simple; we aim to use the different spatial modes of an optical fibre as multiplexed data transmission channels. These modes could either be in the form of separate singlemodes in a multicore optical fibre, individual spatial modes of a multimode fibre, or indeed the individual spatial modes of a multimode multicore optical fibre. Regardless of the particular “flavour” of SDM in question, it is clear that significant interfacing issues exist between the optical fibres used in SDM and the conventional single-mode planar lightwave circuits that are essential to process the light (e.g. arrayed waveguide gratings and splitters), and efficient interconnect technologies will be required. One fabrication technology that has emerged as a possible route to solve these interconnection issues is ultrafast laser inscription (ULI), which relies on the use of focused ultrashort laser pulses to directly inscribe three-dimensional waveguide structures inside a bulk dielectric. In this paper, I describe some of the work that has been conducted around the world to apply the unique waveguide fabrication capabilities of ULI to the development of 3D photonic components for applications in SDM.
Theoretical study of the ionization of liquid water from its several initial orbitals by fast electron impact

We theoretically study the single ionization of liquid water by energetic electrons through one active-electron first-order model. We analyze the angular ejected electron spectra corresponding to the most external orbitals 1B1, 2A1, 1B2 and 1A1 of a single water molecule. We work to create a realistic description of those orbitals corresponding to single molecules in the liquid phase. This goal is achieved by means of a Wannier orbital formalism. Multiple differential cross sections are computed and compared with previous calculations for both liquid and gas phases. In addition, our present results are integrated over all orientations and compared with experimental ones for randomly oriented vapour water molecules, as no experiments currently exist for the liquid phase. Moreover, we estimate the influence of the passive electrons on the reaction by means of a model potential.
Characterizations of Levitin–Polyak well-posedness by perturbations for the split variational inequality problem

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Levitin–polyak well-posedness by perturbations of the split variational inequality problem in reflexive Banach spaces. Furi-Vignoli-type characterizations are established for the well-posedness. We prove that the weak generalized Levitin–Polyak well-posedness by perturbations is equivalent to the nonemptiness and boundedness of the solution set of the problem. Finally, we discuss the relations between the Levitin–Polyak well-posedness by perturbations of the split variational inequality problem and the Levitin–Polyak well-posedness by perturbations of the split minimization problem when the split variational inequality problem arises from the split minimization problem.
Use of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test for gamma process

This article deals with the use of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test for comparing an observed gamma process with a reference process or for comparing two observed gamma processes. In the case of observed processes with periodic inspections, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test can be applied directly. It is pointed out that, from the power of test point of view, the length of monitoring is more important than the number of observations. In the case of observed processes with aperiodic inspections, a method for building an empirical cumulative distribution required for the test is proposed. It consists of generating equal time increment observations from the original sample thanks to the gamma bridge. A sort of the original observations for improving the power of the test is proposed. Simulations have proved the feasibility of the approach and shown that when the variance of the time increments increases, the power of the test decreases only a little. An illustrative example showing the interest of such a test for maintenance is described.
Integrating Fairness in Machine Learning Development Life Cycle: Fair CRISP-DM

ABSTRACT:Developing efficient processes for building machine learning (ML) applications is an emerging topic for research. One of the well-known frameworks for organizing, developing, and deploying predictive machine learning models is cross-industry standard for data mining (CRISP-DM). However, the framework does not provide any guidelines for detecting and mitigating different types of fairness-related biases in the development of ML applications. The study of these biases is a relatively recent stream of research. To address this significant theoretical and practical gap, we propose a new framework—Fair CRISP-DM, which groups and maps these biases corresponding to each phase of an ML application development. Through this study, we contribute to the literature on ML development and fairness. We present recommendations to ML researchers on including fairness as part of the ML evaluation process. Further, ML practitioners can use our framework to identify and mitigate fairness-related biases in each phase of an ML project development. Finally, we also discuss emerging technologies which can help developers to detect and mitigate biases in different stages of ML application development.
Characteristics of and indexes for evaluating the balancing stability of excellent shooting athletes in China

The authors used the foot-scan balance test system to test the balancing stability of high performance pis-tol and riffle shooting athletes in China,and drew the following main conclusions by analyzing the results:1) among all the shooting athletes,male pistol shooting athletes have the poorest body posture balancing stability and adjust-ing ability;2) shooting training can only reduce the body shaking area as well as back and forth shaking amplitude in the eye-opening condition;3) common balancing stability indexes (back and forth shaking amplitude,left and right shaking amplitude,track length and shaking area of body center of gravity) cannot accurately reflect the char-acteristics of balancing stability of high performance shooting athletes,while the track length per unit area (the ratio of total track length to shaking area),a derivative index,can not only show the balancing stability,but also reflect the posture adjusting ability. When the shaking area is fixed,larger track length per unit area indicates stronger ad-justing ability,faster shaking frequency,better body balancing stability,and lesser effect on the guns at actual shooting. This index can be used as an index for evaluating and selecting shooting athletes.
ON THE LARGE DEFLECTION OF A CIRCULAR PLATE WITH A CIRCULAR HOLE AT THE CENTER UNDER UNIFORM LOAD

We consider a circular ring plate with inner edge fixed and outer edge fixed and supported under the action of uniformly distributed load over entire actual surface. We write down the boundary conditions and the von Karman equations for the large deflection of such a plate in a dimensionless form and then solve them by the perturbation method based upon the smallness of the maximum deflection at the inner edge. Design formulae for stress and maximum deflection, which are of practical importance, are given at the end of the paper.
Coupling 3D Eulerian, Heightfield and Particle Methods for Interactive Simulation of Large Scale Liquid Phenomena

We propose a new method to simulate large scale water phenomena by combining particle, 3D grid and height field methods. In contrast to most hybrid approaches that use particles to simulate foam and spray only, we also represent the bulk of water near the surface with both particles and a grid depending on the regions of interest and switch between those two representations during the course of the simulation. For the coupling we leverage the recent idea of tracking the water surface with a density field in grid based methods. Combining particles and a grid simulation then amounts to adding the density field of the particles and the one stored on the grid. For open scenes, we simulate the water outside of the 3D grid domain by solving the Shallow Water Equations on a height field. We propose new methods to couple these two domains such that waves travel naturally across the border. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in various scenarios including a whale breaching simulation, all running in real-time or at interactive rates.
Research of fractal features of non-woven fabrics′s filter and mechanical properties

The images of non-woven fabrics from the techniques of collection to melting and sprinkling are analysed and identified based on the theory of fractal and using by the computer image processing,it is found that nonwoven fabrics has the character of similar fractal under the meaning of statistics.Through calculating the dimension of fractal and the filtering efficiency and mechanical performance of sample,the relations between non-woven fabrics and dimensions of fractal are found out,which give us a feasible evaluating and testing method to the further study of non-woven fabrics.
First-principles investigation of carbon substitution for lead in ferroelectric lead titanate

ABSTRACT Lead titanate, a room-temperature ferroelectric, dielectric material, is of great interest for technological applications. Defects play an important role upon its properties, such as remnant polarization, motion of domain walls, dielectric constant and leakage current, and organic species present during growth make carbon a key impurity. This paper presents a first principles study of the structural and electronic properties of carbon substituting for lead in tetragonal lead titanate. Highly characteristic vibrational modes are predicted to provide a route to experimental identification.
Automatic Method for Contrast Enhancement of Natural Color Images

The contrast enhancement is great challenge in the image processing when images are suffering from poor contrast problem. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem an automatic method is proposed for contrast enhancement of natural color images. The proposed method consist of two stages: in first stage lightness component in YIQ color space is normalized by sigmoid function after the adaptive histogram equalization is applied on Y component and in second stage automatic color contrast enhancement algorithm is applied on output of the first stage. The proposed algorithm is tested on different NASA color images, hyperspectral color images and other types of natural color images. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms in terms of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor. The higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor imply that the visual quality of the enhanced image is good. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed algorithm provides higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor as compared to other existing contrast enhancement algorithms. The proposed algorithm also provides better visual enhancement results as compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms.
Yes, it matters: in contrast to blood plasma, serum metabolomics is confounded by platelets

Metabolomics is an emerging and powerful molecular profiling method supporting clinical investigations. For clinical metabolomics studies, serum is commonly used. Serum is collected after blood coagulation, a complex biochemical process involving active platelet metabolism. This may proof relevant as platelet counts and function may vary substantially in individuals. Applying a multi-omics analysis strategy comprising proteins and metabolites with a focus on lipid mediators, we systematically investigated serum and plasma obtained from the same healthy donors. While Biocrates MxP Quant 500 results correlated well (n=461, R2=0.991), lipid mediators (n=77, R2=0.906) and proteins (n=322, R2=0.860) differed substantially between serum and plasma. Actually, secretome analysis of activated platelets identified all proteins and most lipid mediators significantly enriched in serum when compared to plasma. Furthermore, a prospective, randomized, controlled parallel group metabolomics trial was performed, monitored by serum and plasma analyses. Healthy individuals received either acetylsalicylic acid, affecting platelets, or omega-3 fatty acids, hardly affecting platelets, for a period of seven days. In the acetylsalicylic acid group, serum analysis apparently demonstrated a significant drug-induced downregulation of the lipid mediators TXB2 and 12-HETE. The absence of these observation in plasma analyses suggested that these drug effects took place only during blood coagulation. Other effects of acetylsalicylic acid on alpha-linolenic acid and the fatty acid composition of triglycerides were detected both in serum and plasma. In the omega-3 fatty acid group, serum and plasma analysis results did not differ. These data strongly support the hypothesis that the serum metabolome is substantially confounded by platelets.
Severe liver damage, low bone mineral content, and PDXDC1/TTC39B gene variations linked to NAFLD with metabolic syndrome

Background: Fatty liver disease is a pathologic condition of liver due to excess deposition of fat in the liver and is considered as hepatic manifestation of metabolic syndrome (MetS). Metabolic syndrome is comorbid with multiorgan abnormalities and diseases. However, the phenotypic uniqueness and genetic background of fatty liver patients in the presence/absence of metabolic syndrome are unclear. Methods: A cohort of 551 individuals with (FLD+) or without fatty liver (FLD-) was recruited.We subdivided the study cohort based on the presence or absence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) into four groups- Group4FLD+/MetS+; n=221, Group3FLD+/MetS-; n=39, Group2FLD- /MetS+; n=175 and Group1FLD-/MetS- n=116. Pathophysiology was compared between the study groups. Association of genomic variants with Group4FLD+/MetS+; n=167 was studied compared to Group1FLD-/MetS-; n=74. The effects of the associated variants on gene expression were studied using eQTL mapping. Results and conclusions: Among 551 individuals, 47.2% had fatty liver (FLD+) and 71.87% had metabolic syndrome (MetS+). Compared to Group3FLD+/MetS-, Group4FLD+/MetS+ patients had significantly higher age, higher adiposity, severe diabetic and lipid profile, liver damage marker, CRP, low bone mineral content and higher liver damage, both among the obese and the non-obese. Non-obese Group2FLD-/MetS+ patients had significantly higher serum TG and lower HDL, while obese Group3FLD+/MetS- patients had higher liver damage markers. Additionally, we also showed that in our population, Group4FLD+/MetS+ patients carried higher risk allele frequency in rs3761472-G(SAMM50,OR=2.9(2.0-4.1); p=0.002), rs738409- G(PNPLA3,OR=2.8(1.9-4.07)p=0.003),rs58542926-A(TM6SF2,OR=2.7(1.9- 3.9)p=0.021),rs35665085-A(CECR5,OR=2.7(1.9-3.9)p=0.038),rs471364- G(TTC39B,OR=3.1(2.1-4.5)p=0.001),rs2800-G(SLC9A9,OR=3.1(2-4.5)p=0.028),rs7200543- A(PDXDC1,OR=2.261(1.1-4.8)p=0.031). Group4 patients with rs7200543-AA showed poor skeletal health. Thus, fatty liver with metabolic syndrome showed the most severe disease phenotype.
Are Character-level Translations Worth the Wait? Comparing ByT5 and mT5 for Machine Translation

Pretrained character-level and byte-level language models have been shown to be competitive with popular subword models across a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, there has been little research on their effectiveness for neural machine translation (NMT), particularly within the popular pretrain-then-finetune paradigm. This work performs an extensive comparison across multiple languages and experimental conditions of character- and subword-level pretrained models (ByT5 and mT5, respectively) on NMT. We show the effectiveness of character-level modeling in translation, particularly in cases where fine-tuning data is limited. In our analysis, we show how character models' gains in translation quality are reflected in better translations of orthographically similar words and rare words. While evaluating the importance of source texts in driving model predictions, we highlight word-level patterns within ByT5, suggesting an ability to modulate word-level and character-level information during generation. We conclude by assessing the efficiency tradeoff of byte models, suggesting their usage in non-time-critical scenarios to boost translation quality.
Role of effective mass anisotropy in realizing a hybrid nodal-line fermion state

Understanding the role of lattice geometry in shaping topological states and their properties is of fundamental importance to condensed matter and device physics. Here we demonstrate how an anisotropic crystal lattice drives a topological hybrid nodal line in transition metal tetraphosphides $Tm$P$_4$ ($Tm$ = Transition metal). $Tm$P$_4$ constitutes a unique class of black phosphorus materials formed by intercalating transition metal ions between the phosphorus layers without destroying the characteristic anisotropic band structure of the black phosphorous. Based on the first-principles calculations and $k \cdot p$ theory, we show that $Tm$P$_4$ harbor a single hybrid nodal line formed between oppositely-oriented anisotropic $Tm~d$ and P states unhinged from the high-symmetry planes. The nodal line consists of both type-I and type-II nodal band crossings whose nature and location are determined by the effective-mass anisotropies of the intersecting bands. We further discuss a possible topological phase transition to exemplify the formation of the hybrid nodal line state in $Tm$P$_4$. Our results offer a comprehensive study for understanding the interplay between structural motifs-driven mass anisotropies and topology in anisotropic lattice materials to realize hybrid semimetal states.