Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leadership in further education

This study is concerned with the leadership of the post-incorporation college of further education. The aim is to determine the leadership attributes and role of the principal/chief executive of the newly incorporated colleges and the influence of the corporation and external factors on this role. The 1992 Further and Higher Education Act gave a statutory duty to the principal to lead staff in the college; what it did not do was define that role. The Act was farreaching in its ramifications for the further education sector as it removed colleges from the management structure of the Local Education Authority and converted them into corporate, charitable organisations with autonomous governing bodies, variously called corporations, corporation members or, board members. These corporations were given responsibility for not only the financial status of the college but also for the selection and support of the principal. The principal in turn becomes the Chief Executive Officer(CEO) to the corporation, an unfamiliar business role as well as the traditional leader of the college. With reference to the literature the historical context of the Act and its impact has been researched and the influence and ideologies for the changes have been identified. The identity, reputation and responsibilities of the further education colleges have all been enhanced in part as a result of the Act and partly as the result of a demanding Further Education Funding Council(FEFC) which are at the interface between the government and the colleges and are the financial masters of the sector. The change models for further education have been led by college principals and their corporations. The leadership literature has also been reviewed to provide the empirical support for the identification of the leadership attributes of principals of colleges. The literature on leadership is very substantial and much of it theoretical, contradictory and lacking in application. Much of it is about non-college leadership but some is considered to be relevant to the leadership required in colleges. The identification of what is required was made up of the results of a survey of the attributes that were considered important for leading a college of further education by the principals themselves. The views of corporations were determined by analysing the application details for principal/chief executive posts. Since incorporation, colleges have had to face up to quite dramatic and considerable change. Within colleges, principals have had a major role to play in the leadership of such change. The factors that influence this leadership have been identified along with their responsibilities as leaders. The corporations' view of leadership is used both as a comparison and as a way of identifying their relationship with the principal. This relationship is considered in the light of new and developmental policies in further education on the election of a Labour Government in 1997.
Research on Vehicle Electronic Stability Control Method

Electronic stability control system (ESC) is one of the advanced active safety technology for modern vehicles. The active yaw-moment control (AYC) is one of the most important parts of ESC to enhance vehicle active safety. The control method with combination of logic threshold and PID method is brought out. The PID parameters are generated by logic threshold method through the controller adjusting parameters. The wheel brake torque to keep vehicle stable is calculated by PD controller. The self-correcting threshold of PD control algorithm has the merit of decreasing calculation processes and increasing computation speed. The results of simulation show that the proposed algorithm can be used to control the vehicle more stably under various conditions.
Star Formation in Molecular Clouds

Using studies of nearby star formation with Spitzer, I will argue that star formation is restricted to dense cores within molecular clouds. The nature of these dense cores and their connection to star formation will be discussed. Their distribution over masses and over the cloud is similar to that of stars, and their efficiency of forming stars is much higher than that of the whole cloud. Moving to regions forming more massive stars, we find that the mass distribution of the dense clumps is similar to that of OB associations. The infrared luminosity per unit mass of dense gas is high and comparable to that seen in starburst galaxies. The relation between star formation and dense gas appears to be linear. Understanding the Kennicutt-Schmidt law requires an understanding of what controls the conversion of gas into the dense entities where stars actually form.
Enabling On-Demand Mashups of Open Data with Semantic Services

Analogous to software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), data-as-a-service (DaaS) is used to provide data on demand to users over the Internet and is gaining popularity in the current cloud computing era. In particular, several Open Data initiatives have led to a number of data services in various formats becoming available online, and it remains a challenge to make full use of the data by transferring between and answering queries from different sources in a automatic, dynamic and meaningful manner. In this paper we propose a service-oriented, composition-based approach towards tackling the integration of open data services. We provide a formal, semantic-based modeling of data services and convert the integration problem into the service composition problem. Then the composition graph can be used to create the executable queries to the various data services. We illustrate our idea by using a case study in the real estate domain.
Combination of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Term Frequency-Inverse Cluster Frequency (TFxICF) in Indonesian text clustering with labeling

Due to the limited labeled data, clustering is a solution for classifying documents that do not have prior knowledge. The combination of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) in grouping documents by topic and Term Frequency-Inverse Cluster Frequency (TFxICF) in the labeling was proposed to resolve the problem of classification using clustering completed with a description of the cluster results. Indonesian text preprocessing has been done by the extraction of abbreviations and acronyms, tokenization, stemming and stopwords elimination. Experiments were conducted using Indonesian digital library documents, 113 documents from digital library of STIS and 60 documents from digital library of ITB, to examine the effects of text preprocessing, to compare the cluster results of LDA with other clustering algorithms and to compare the use of word and phrase tokens in the clustering and labeling. The cluster quality was measured by using precision, recall, and F-measure and the label quality was determined by similarity with the keywords that most frequently appear in the clusters. Based on the experimental results, preprocessing techniques can improve the cluster quality. LDA algorithm produces documents cluster by topic with cluster quality better than K-Means and Lingo. Word based LDA generates cluster with better quality than phrase based LDA. Moreover, the labeling by using word based TFxICF is more descriptive than phrase based TFxICF. Therefore, the use of word based LDA for clustering and phrase based TFxICF for labeling was proposed.
Two Distinct Subpopulations of Nestin-Positive Cells in Adult Mouse Dentate Gyrus

Neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the adult mammalian hippocampus has been proven in a series of studies, but the differentiation process toward newborn neurons is still unclear. In addition to the immunohistochemical study, electrophysiological membrane recordings of precursor cells could provide an alternative view to address this differentiation process. In this study, we performed green fluorescent protein (GFP)-guided selective recordings of nestin-positive progenitor cells in adult dentate gyrus by means of nestin-promoter GFP transgenic mice, because nestin is a typical marker for precursor cells in the adult dentate gyrus. The patch-clamp recordings clearly demonstrated the presence of two distinct subpopulations (type I and type II) of nestin-positive cells. Type I cells had a lower input resistance value of 77.1 MΩ (geometric mean), and their radial processes were stained with anti-glial fibrillary acidic protein antibody. On the other hand, type II nestin-positive cells had a higher input resistance value of 2110 MΩ and expressed voltage-dependent sodium current. In most cases, type II cells were stained with anti-polysialylated neural cell adhesion molecule. Taken together with a bromodeoxyuridine pulse-chase analysis, our results may reflect a rapid and dynamic cell conversion of nestin-positive progenitor, from type I to type II, at an early stage of adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus.
Privacy-preserving Class Ratio Estimation

In this paper we present learning models for the class ratio estimation problem, which takes as input an unlabeled set of instances and predicts the proportions of instances in the set belonging to the different classes. This problem has applications in social and commercial data analysis. Existing models for class-ratio estimation however require instance-level supervision. Whereas in domains like politics, and demography, set-level supervision is more common. We present a new method for directly estimating class-ratios using set-level supervision. Another serious limitation in applying these techniques to sensitive domains like health is data privacy. We propose a novel label privacy-preserving mechanism that is well-suited for supervised class ratio estimation and has guarantees for achieving efficient differential privacy, provided the per-class counts are large enough. We derive learning bounds for the estimation with and without privacy constraints, which lead to important insights for the data-publisher. Extensive empirical evaluation shows that our model is more accurate than existing methods and that the proposed privacy mechanism and learning model are well-suited for each other.
Underground water dam levels and energy consumption prediction using computational intelligence techniques

Three computational intelligence algorithms (k-nearest neighbors, a naïve Bayes' classifier, and decision trees) were applied on a double pump station mine to monitor and predict the dam levels and energy consumption. This work was carried out to inspect the feasibility of using computational intelligence in certain aspects of the mining industry. If successful, computational intelligence systems could lead to improved safety and reduced electrical energy consumption. The results show k nearest neighbors' technique to be more efficient when compared with decision trees, and naïve Bayes' classifier techniques in terms of predicting underground dam levels and pumps energy consumption.
Adenylate kinase-catalyzed phosphotransfer in the myocardium : increased contribution in heart failure.

Although the downregulation of creatine kinase activity has been associated with heart failure, creatine kinase-deficient transgenic hearts have a preserved contractile function. This suggests the existence of alternative phosphotransfer pathways in the myocardium, the identity of which is still unknown. In this study, we examined the contribution of adenylate kinase-catalyzed phosphotransfer to myocardial energetics. In the isolated mitochondria/actomyosin system, which possesses endogenous adenylate kinase activity in both compartments, substrates for adenylate kinase promoted the rate and amplitude of actomyosin contraction that was further enhanced by purified adenylate kinase. Inhibition of adenylate kinase activity diminished both actomyosin contraction and mitochondrial respiration, which indicated reduced energy flow between mitochondria and myofibrils. In intact myocardium, the net adenylate kinase-catalyzed phosphotransfer rate was 10% of the total ATP turnover rate as measured by 18O-phosphoryl labeling in conjunction with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. In pacing-induced failing heart, adenylate kinase-catalyzed phosphotransfer increased by 134% and contributed 21% to the total ATP turnover. Concomitantly, the contribution by creatine kinase dropped from 89% in normal hearts to 40% in failing hearts. These phosphotransfer changes were associated with reduced levels of metabolically active ATP but maintained overall ATP turnover rate. Thus, this study provides evidence that adenylate kinase facilitates the transfer of high-energy phosphoryls and signal communication between mitochondria and actomyosin in cardiac muscle, with an increased contribution to cellular phosphotransfer in heart failure. This phosphotransfer function renders adenylate kinase an important component for optimal myocardial bioenergetics and a compensatory mechanism in response to impaired intracellular energy flux in the failing heart.
Predisposing factors to severe external root resorption associated to orthodontic treatment.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate predisposing factors among patients who developed moderate or severe external root resorption (Malmgren's grades 3 and 4), on the maxillary incisors, during fixed orthodontic treatment in the permanent dentition. METHODS Ninety-nine patients who underwent orthodontic treatment with fixed edgewise appliances were selected. Patients were divided into two groups: G1 - 50 patients with no root resorption or presenting only apical irregularities (Malmgren's grades 0 and 1) at the end of the treatment, with mean initial age of 16.79 years and mean treatment time of 3.21 years; G2 - 49 patients presenting moderate or severe root resorption (Malmgren's grades 3 and 4) at the end of treatment on the maxillary incisors, with mean initial age of 19.92 years and mean treatment time of 3.98 years. Periapical radiographs and lateral cephalograms were evaluated. Factors that could influence the occurrence of severe root resorption were also recorded. Statistical analysis included chi-square tests, Fisher's exact test and independent t tests. RESULTS The results demonstrated significant difference between the groups for the variables: Extractions, initial degree of root resorption, root length and crown/root ratio at the beginning, and cortical thickness of the alveolar bone. CONCLUSION It can be concluded that: Presence of root resorption before the beginning of treatment, extractions, reduced root length, decreased crown/root ratio and thin alveolar bone represent risk factors for severe root resorption in maxillary incisors during orthodontic treatment.
The Effect of Job Displacement on the Transitions to Employment and Early Retirement for Older Workers in Four European Countries

Despite the increased frequency of job loss for older workers in Europe, little is known on its effect on the work-retirement decision. Employing individual data from the European Community Household Panel for Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K., a multivariate competing-risks hazard model is estimated in which the effect of job displacement is identified separately for transitions into re-employment and retirement. The findings suggest that in countries with institutional provisions for older unemployed which offer a pathway to early retirement such as, Germany and Spain, older displaced workers exhibit lower re-employment and higher retirement rates compared to the non-displaced. These results are robust to dynamic selection due to unobserved heterogeneity and to the endogeneity of displacement.
Segmentation of MR brain images using FCM improved by artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm

Segmentation of medical images, particularly magnetic resonance images of brain is complex and it is considered as a huge challenge in image processing. Among the numerous algorithms presented in this context, the fuzzy C-mean (FCM) algorithm is widely used in MR images segmentation. Recently, researchers have introduced two new parameters in order to improve the performance of FCM algorithm, which are calculated using neural network in a complex and time consuming manner. These two parameters have been then calculated by other researchers using genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, which although it has reduced the time but no change obtained in the resulted segmentation quality. In this paper we calculate these two parameters using the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm aiming to both reduce the time and to reach a higher quality than that obtained by previous reports. Finally, we segment real MR images with our proposed algorithm and compare it with previous presented algorithms.
Multi-Document Summarization: Methodologies and Evaluations

This paper describes a system for the summarization of multiple documents. The system produces multi-document summaries using clustering techniques to identify common themes across the set of documents. For each theme, the system identifies representative passages that are included in the final summary. We also describe a methodology for evaluation of our system which is based upon a question answering task. Results of our evaluation are also presented.
Chemical and functional diversity of small molecule ligands for RNA.

Functional RNAs such as ribosomal RNA and structured domains of mRNA are targets for small molecule ligands that can act as modulators of the RNA biological activity. Natural ligands for RNA display a bewildering structural and chemical complexity that has yet to be matched by synthetic RNA binders. Comparison of natural and artificial ligands for RNA may help to direct future approaches to design and synthesize potent novel scaffolds for specific recognition of RNA targets.
System-level application-aware dynamic power management in adaptive pipelined MPSoCs for multimedia

System-level dynamic power management (DPM) schemes in Multiprocessor System on Chips (MPSoCs) exploit the idleness of processors to reduce the energy consumption by putting idle processors to low-power states. In the presence of multiple low-power states, the challenge is to predict the duration of the idle period with high accuracy so that the most beneficial power state can be selected for the idle processor. In this work, we propose a novel dynamic power management scheme for adaptive pipelined MPSoCs, suitable for multimedia applications. We leverage application knowledge in the form of future workload prediction to forecast the duration of idle periods. The predicted duration is then used to select an appropriate power state for the idle processor. We proposed five heuristics as part of the DPM and compared their effectiveness using an MPSoC implementation of the H.264 video encoder supporting HD720p at 30 fps. The results show that one of the application prediction based heuristic (MAMAPBH) predicted the most beneficial power states for idle processors with less than 3% error when compared to an optimal solution. In terms of energy savings, MAMAPBH was always within 1% of the energy savings of the optimal solution. When compared with a naive approach (where only one of the possible power states is used for all the idle processors), MAMAPBH achieved up to 40% more energy savings with only 0.5% degradation in throughput. These results signify the importance of leveraging application knowledge at system-level for dynamic power management schemes.
Microhabitat selection by feral ferrets (Mustela furo) in a pastoral habitat, East Otago, New Zealand

The spatial distribution of feral ferret (Mustela furo) activity and denning were studied using ink-print tracking tunnels and radio-tracking within pastoral farmland containing a mosaic of grazed (developed and semi- developed) and ungrazed pasture, scrub, tree plantation and scrubby fence lines at Palmerston, East Otago, South Island, New Zealand. Ferrets concentrated their activity in grazed areas but within these areas they were found more often where herbs, scrub and woody cover were present, and where there was an ecotone between pasture and vegetation cover. Ferrets were more likely to be present close to fence lines. When denning, ferrets selected areas with cover of all types and avoided open pasture areas. Ferrets particularly favoured man-made structures (woolsheds, haybarns, sheds etc.) for dens. The implications of these microhabitat selections by ferrets to wildlife conservation in New Zealand are discussed. Ferrets are a possible vector of bovine tuberculosis (Mycobacterium bovis). Ferrets may transmit tuberculosis to stock via contaminated food or latrines deposited outside den sites (68% of dens were accessible to stock). Concentration of ferret movements along pasture ecotones may be a factor facilitating tuberculosis transmission between possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) and ferrets, and between ferrets and stock.
Capital Structure Determinants for Tax‐Exempt Organisations: Evidence from the UK

This study looks into the determinants of capital structure in the absence of tax incentives. I find that attributes normally associated with debt use for taxable corporations are likewise correlated with debt use in the tax‐exempt sector. These include the organisation's age, asset tangibility, governance structure, industry grouping, liquidity, profitability, and size. Tax‐exempt sector‐specific findings indicate that debt use is also related to the size of the organisation's endowment and the amount of voluntary income. This study also demonstrates the portability of the theory of capital structure by extending the findings in Smith (2010) beyond the United States.
Fast mode selection with sub-sampled based block matching algorithm and architecture design for H.264/AVC fast intra prediction

In this paper, we propose a regular fast algorithm, which is called Block Matching Algorithm (BMA), to predict the best direction mode except for the DC mode for fast intra mode decision. The edge detective technique predicts luma-4×4, luma16×16, and chroma-8×8 modes directly. We partition the intra prediction procedure into two steps. At the first step, we use the pre-processing mode selection algorithms to find the primary mode which is selected for fast prediction. At the second step, the selected fewer high-potential candidate modes are applied to calculate the RD cost for the mode decision. Simulation results show that the proposed BMA method reduces the encoding time by 75%, and requires bit-rate increase about 2% and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) decrease about 0.07 dB in QCIF and CIF sequences, compared with the H.264/AVC JM 14.2 software. The methods achieve less PSNR degradation and bit-rate increase than the previous methods with more encoding time reduction. By implementing with TSMC 0. 18μm CMOS standard cell library, the proposed sub-sampled BMA based processor achieves the full-HD 1920×1080 real-time encoding with 104MHz operational frequency.