Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long work hours and the wellbeing of fathers and their families

The average hours worked by full-time employees in Australia have increased since the late 1970s. This, combined with increases in female labour force participation, has led to concerns about the impact of long work hours on family life. This paper explores the relationship between fathers' work hours, their own wellbeing and that of their families using data from the HILDA survey. Overall, satisfaction with work hours decreases as the number of hours worked increases beyond the standard working week. However, long hours are not necessarily, or even on average associated with pervasively lower wellbeing. Work hours are negatively related to only two of the thirteen measures of wellbeing examined. For fathers working very long hours, their satisfaction with their work hours is found to be very important to the relationship between work hours and wellbeing.
New insights of cooperation among ants in Ant Colony Decision Trees

In this paper, we propose a new method for constructing decision trees based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The ACO is a metaheuristic inspired by the behavior of real ants, where they search for optimal solutions by considering both local heuristic and previous knowledge, observed by pheromone changes. Good results of the ant colony algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems suggest an appropriate effectiveness of the approach also in the task of constructing decision trees. In order to improve the accuracy of decision trees we propose an Ant Colony algorithm for constructing Decision Trees (ACDT - www.ACDTalgorithm.com). A heuristic function used in the new algorithm is based on the splitting rule of the CART algorithm (Classification and Regression Trees). The proposed algorithm is evaluated in terms of exploration/exploitation rate, heuristic function, cooperation among ants, initial pheromone value.
Detection, isolation and characterisation of white grub (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) pathogens in Mauritius and Tanzania.

White grubs can cause severe damage and loss to sugarcane in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Control measures rely on the use of chemicals. In endeavours to find environmentally safer control measures, a project was initiated on research and development of biopesticides in this region. The main objectives of the project are the detection, identification and isolation of entomopathogens from scarab larvae and adult beetles. Soil samples were collected from diverse habitats in the different agroclimatic zones of Mauritius and baited mainly with either Galleria mellonella or Chilo sacchariphagus larvae for pathogen-trapping. Additionally, field-collected white grubs and beetles from soil surveys and light traps were screened for the presence of pathogens. Twelve consignments from Mauritius containing 195 cadavers were shipped to the ARC-Small Grain Institute, South Africa, for pathogen isolation and identification. These samples yielded 38 isolates of Metarhizium anisopliae and one of Beauveria bassiana. A total of 71 bacterial isolates were also isolated and cryopreserved. At TPC Ltd in Tanzania, project work comprised breeding of G. mellonella, soil samplings and white grub collecting. Beetles were obtained from light traps maintained on the estate. Ten consignments containing 453 infected insects were shipped to ARC-SGI. These samples yielded 32 isolates of M. anisopliae and 10 of B. bassiana, with 21 cadavers found infected with Ophiocordyceps sp. and one infected with Steinernema sp. A total 163 bacterial isolates were also isolated and cryopreserved.
Enhancing effects of acute psychosocial stress on priming of non-declarative memory in healthy young adults

Social stress affects cognitive processes in general, and memory performance in particular. However, the direction of these effects has not been clearly established, as it depends on several factors. Our aim was to determine the impact of the hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis and sympathetic nervous system (SNS) reactivity to psychosocial stress on short-term non-declarative memory and declarative memory performance. Fifty-two young participants (18 men, 34 women) were subjected to the Trier Social Stress Task (TSST) and a control condition in a crossover design. Implicit memory was assessed by a priming test, and explicit memory was assessed by the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). The TSST provoked greater salivary cortisol and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) responses than the control task. Men had a higher cortisol response to stress than women, but no sex differences were found for sAA release. Stress was associated with an enhancement of priming but did not affect declarative memory. Additionally, the enhancement on the priming test was higher in those whose sAA levels increased more in response to stress (r48 = 0.339, p = 0.018). Our results confirm an effect of acute stress on priming, and that this effect is related to SNS activity. In addition, they suggest a different relationship between stress biomarkers and the different memory systems.
3D face landmark auto detection

This paper presents our methodology for Landmark Point detection to improve 3D face recognition in a presence of variant facial expression. The objective was to develop an automatic process for distinguishing and segmenting to be embedded in a 3D face recognition system using only 3D Point Distribution Model (PDM) as input. The approach used hydride method to extract this features from the surface curvature information. Landmark Localization is done on the segmented face via finding the change that decreases the deviation of the model from the mean profile. Face registering is achieved using previous anthropometric information and the localized landmarks. The results confirm that the method used is accurate and robust for the proposed application.
Symbolic interval time series forecasting using a hybrid model

This paper presents two approaches to symbolic interval time series forecasting. The first approach is based on the autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model and the second is based on a hybrid methodology that combines both ARMA and artificial neural network (ANN) models. In the proposed approaches, two models are respectively fitted to the mid-point and range of the interval values assumed by the symbolic interval time series in the learning set. The forecast of the lower and upper bounds of the interval value of the time series is accomplished through the combination of forecasts from the mid-point and range of the interval values. The evaluation of the proposed models is based on the estimation of the average behaviour of the mean absolute error and mean square error in the framework of a Monte Carlo experiment.
Empirical study on effects of script minification and HTTP compression for traffic reduction

Code-on-demand is an architectural style that a client dynamically downloads a raw script file and executes it on the client-side. This style causes a problem of network traffic because a raw script is not always compiled or minified in advance. Formatting rules, such as indents, line breaks and comments for ensuring human readability, are not necessary to the execution. In order to save wasteful data transfer, it is necessary to minify or optimize the script on the entirety of the Web. In this paper, we explore the potential for JavaScript size reduction with focus on the two reduction approaches: script minification and HTTP compression. The main two research questions are: RQ1: How many percent of websites have reduction potential? RQ2: How much JavaScript size can be reduced on the Web? Our results show that about 40% of total size of JavaScript files used on the top 500 websites can be potentially reduced by a script minification. Moreover, the current JavaScript data traffic is saving over 50% by HTTP compression. If every website was configured to use HTTP compression, we can achieve a reduction rate of 5% to 20%.
CETP Lowers TLR4 Expression Which Attenuates the Inflammatory Response Induced by LPS and Polymicrobial Sepsis

Sepsis is a systemic inflammatory response to infection eliciting high mortality rate which is a serious health problem. Despite numerous studies seeking for therapeutic alternatives, the mechanisms involved in this disease remain elusive. In this study we evaluated the influence of cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP), a glycoprotein that promotes the transfer of lipids between lipoproteins, on the inflammatory response in mice. Human CETP transgenic mice were compared to control mice (wild type, WT) after polymicrobial sepsis induced by cecal ligation and puncture (CLP), aiming at investigating their survival rate and inflammatory profiles. Macrophages from the peritoneal cavity were stimulated with LPS in the presence or absence of recombinant CETP for phenotypic and functional studies. In comparison to WT mice, CETP mice showed higher survival rate, lower IL-6 plasma concentration, and decreased liver toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and acyloxyacyl hydrolase (AOAH) protein. Moreover, macrophages from WT mice to which recombinant human CETP was added decreased LPS uptake, TLR4 expression, NF-κB activation and IL-6 secretion. This raises the possibility for new therapeutic tools in sepsis while suggesting that lowering CETP by pharmacological inhibitors should be inconvenient in the context of sepsis and infectious diseases.
Manufacturing strategy and performance: A study of the UK engineering industry

Details the findings of a search for manufacturing “strategic groups” in the engineering industry, that is a set of firms competing within an industry on the basis of similar combinations of business scope and resource commitments. The research methodology used was to adopt stockturns (excluding work in process), as a measure of manufacturing scope. Manufacturing throughput efficiency was selected as a measure of production engineering resource commitment. An initial grouping of companies was accomplished by using these two manufacturing performance variables. Comparisons were then made of the manufacturing practices and performances of the firms in the four strategic groups that were formed. The results show statistically significant differences in the performance of each of the strategic groups formed. They can also serve as benchmarks for the evaluation of manufacturing management performance. The proposed manufacturing strategy and performance matrix provides a practical framework for strategic planning.
Analysis of Farmers’ Willingness to Adopt Improved Peanut Varieties in Northern Ghana with the use of Baseline Survey Data.

This study employed a probit model to identify the factors that influence the willingness of farmers in northern Ghana to adopt improved peanut varieties. A cross-sectional data of 206 peanut farmers from the Tamale Metropolitan, Tolon-Kumbungu and Savelugu-Nanton districts in the northern region of Ghana were used in the analysis. The estimated results indicate that Tolon-Kumbungu district (location), early maturity, farm size, ownership of a radio and membership in a farm organization significantly influence farmer willingness to adopt improved peanut varieties.
The ecology of poverty: nutrition, parasites, and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.

H IV/AIDS continues to spread throughout the developing world, in transition countries, and among poor and marginalized populations in industrialized countries. In its third decade, and even with increased resources, global AIDS policy is still failing to stem the epidemic. HIV prevention fails because it ignores the fundamental causes of the epidemic, it is unscientific, and it attempts to intervene at the last minute with programs limited to behavior change. The HIV epidemic is not an isolated event. It is the predictable result of declining economies, insecure food systems, and inadequate investment in water, sanitation, health care, and education. The crisis of sustainable agricultural systems , most notably in Sub-Saharan Africa but elsewhere as well, has aggravated the health crisis in developing countries and favored the spread of HIV. The collapse of agricultural economies caused rapid urbanization, unemployment, and increasing inequality. The AIDS literature addresses, to some extent, the effect of economic crisis on behavior through the disruption of relationships and through pressures toward unsafe sex, in particular in the form of commercial sex for survival. Little emphasis, however, has been placed on the direct, biological effects of malnutrition and unsanitary conditions on the vulnerability of individuals and societies to HIV. The epidemic of HIV cannot be explained by behavioral factors alone, even though a necessary condition is contact through sex, needles or other medical instruments , or mother to child. Scientific evidence demonstrates the role of biological cofactors such as malnutrition and parasitic and infectious diseases in enabling the transmission of HIV. Although AIDS policy organizations use the phrase, " AIDS
Reorganization of motor function and space representation in body machine interfaces

To control assistive devices, people with severe paralysis must reorganize their residual body motions for carrying out new functional tasks. Body-machine interfaces are a new technological tool to facilitate this reorganization. In this study, we investigated motor learning on a group of unimpaired subjects that were trained, via a body-machine interface, to solve a reaching task and to play a computer game by controlling a cursor with coordinated motions of their upper body. While reaching involves continuous motions, the computer game was based on selecting a finite set of keys. Since there are multiple body configurations corresponding to each cursor position and each game command, it is possible that different movement sets or tasks lead to the formation of different representations of the map between body configurations and cursor coordinates. In contrast, we found that subjects tended toward a single stable map. We discuss how the stability and robustness properties of the learned map are consistent with the possibility to exploit redundancy for optimizing performance in different tasks.
Bosonic coherent motions in the Universe

We review the role of fundamental spin-0 bosons as bosonic coherent motion (BCM) in the Universe. The fundamental spin-0 bosons have the potential to account for the baryon number generation, cold dark matter (CDM) via BCM, inflation, and dark energy. Among these, we pay particular attention to the CDM possibility because it can be experimentally tested with the current experimental techniques. We also comment on the panoply of the other roles of spin-0 bosons--such as those for cosmic accelerations at early and late times.
The BMAP / G / l QUEUE : A Tutorial *

We present an overview of recent results related to the single server queue with general independent and identically distributed service times and a batch Markovian arrival process (BMAP). The BMAP encompasses a wide range of arrival processes and yet, mathematically, the BMAP/G/I model is a relatively simple matrix generalization of the M/G/l queue. Stationary and transient distributions for the queue length and waiting time distributions are presented. We discuss numerical algorithms for computing these quantities, which exploit both matrix analytic results and numerical transform inversion. Two-dimensional transform inversion is used for the transient results.
Household Preference and Financial Commitment to Flood Insurance in South‐East Queensland

Many Queenslanders who were affected by the severe flood events in 2011 failed to recover their losses. Arrangements for flood insurance are under federal reviews in response to mounting public pressure. Against this backdrop, a household survey was conducted to solicit residents' preferences. The majority of interviewed residents favoured optional purchase of flood insurance. Non‐insurance was associated with expectations of liberal assistance, indicating the possibility of ‘moral hazard’. Willingness to pay for flood insurance was related to social influence. The non‐insured households would spend more if they expected positive responses from people around. Attempts to reduce non‐insurance should address aspects of social influence.
Rescue Therapy for Helicobacter pylori Infection 2012

Helicobacter pylori infection is the main cause of gastritis, gastroduodenal ulcer disease, and gastric cancer. After 30 years of experience in H. pylori treatment, however, the ideal regimen to treat this infection has still to be found. Nowadays, apart from having to know well first-line eradication regimens, we must also be prepared to face treatment failures. In designing a treatment strategy, we should not only focus on the results of primary therapy alone but also on the final—overall—eradication rate. The choice of a “rescue” treatment depends on which treatment is used initially. If a first-line clarithromycin-based regimen was used, a second-line metronidazole-based treatment (quadruple therapy) may be used afterwards, and then a levofloxacin-based combination would be a third-line “rescue” option. Alternatively, it has recently been suggested that levofloxacin-based “rescue” therapy constitutes an encouraging 2nd-line strategy, representing an alternative to quadruple therapy in patients with previous PPI-clarithromycin-amoxicillin failure, with the advantage of efficacy, simplicity and safety. In this case, quadruple regimen may be reserved as a 3rd-line “rescue” option. Even after two consecutive failures, several studies have demonstrated that H. pylori eradication can finally be achieved in almost all patients if several “rescue” therapies are consecutively given.
Distant Speech Recognition: Bridging the Gaps

While great progress has been made in both fields, there is currently a relatively large rift between researchers engaged in acoustic array processing and those engaged in automatic speech recognition. This is unfortunate for many reasons, but most of all because it prevents the two sides, both of whom are investigating different aspects of the same problem, from truly understanding one another and cooperating. In many cases, the two sides see each other through the eyes of strangers. If ground breaking progress is to be made in the emerging field of distant speech recognition (DSR), this abysmal state of affairs must change. In this work, we outline five pressing problems in the DSR research field, and we make initial proposals for their solutions. The problems discussed here are by no means the only ones that must be solved in order to construct truly effective DSR systems. Nonetheless, their solution, in our view, will represent significant first steps towards this goal, inasmuch as the solution of each of these problems will require a substantial change in the mind-sets and thought patterns of those engaged in this field of research.
Gamma limits and U-statistics on the Poisson space

Using Stein's method and the Malliavin calculus of variations, we derive explicit estimates for the Gamma approximation of functionals of a Poisson measure. In particular, conditions are presented under which the distribution of a sequence of multiple Wiener-Ito stochastic integrals with respect to a compensated Poisson measure converges to a Gamma distribution. As an illustration, we present a quantitative version and a non-central extension of a classical theorem by de Jong in the case of degenerate U-statistics of order two. Several multidimensional extensions, in particular allowing for mixed or hybrid limit theorems, are also provided.
Measuring Citizen Participation in South African Public Debates using Twitter: An Exploratory Study

This paper addresses the task of measuring Twitter social attributes that can be used for detecting patterns that show user participation in public debates in South African. We propose a method that leverages observable information on Twitter such as use of language, retweeting user behaviour, and the relationship between topics and the user social network graph. Our experimental results suggest high degrees of citizen participation: people in an otherwise multilingual country tweet in a dominant language; there is more original commentary and interactive discussion; and topics often span natural online communities.
J an 2 00 2 Complex and Non-Complex Phase Structures in Models of Spin Glasses and Information Processing

The gauge theory of spin glasses and statistical-mechanical formulation of errorcorrecting codes are reviewed with an emphasis on their similarities. For the gauge theory, we explain the functional identities on dynamical autocorrelation functions and on the distribution functions of order parameters. These functional identities restrict the possibilities of slow dynamics and complex structure of the phase space. An inequality for error-correcting codes is shown to be interpreted to indicate nonmonotonicity of spin orientation as a function of the temperature in spin glasses.
Background Suppression for Building Accurate Appearance Models in Human Motion Tracking

This paper presents a robust and fully-automatic human motion tracking system without motion priors information using a camera in a fixed location. Bottom-up estimation approaches have recently been applied to such tasks with some success. However, the performance of these approaches is limited by the difficulty of building an effective appearance model. In particular, the appearance model must be derived from initial estimates of the tracked person's limb posture. However, in addition to inaccuracies in this initial estimate, the precise shape, size and boundaries of the tracked person's limbs are not known. Hence it is inevitable that background (non-limb) pixels are included into the appearance model. In the case of smaller limbs such as the arms, this can cause the model to become unrepresentative and sometimes confused with other body parts such as the torso. In this paper, we address the problem of how to automatically extract accurate training samples for building an accurate appearance model, and propose a mechanism for identifying and removing background (negative) pixels via pixel clustering that is robust even with a loose-fitting body shape model. Experiments are conducted to compare the proposed approach against existing appearance-based algorithms without negative pixel removal using several publicly available data sets. Results show that tracking accuracy is consistently improved, and significantly so for small limbs such as the arms.
New method of current control for LCL-interfaced grid-connected three phase voltage source inverter

This paper presents an approach for the connection of a photovoltaic generator to the utility grid. A theoretical analysis, modelling, controlling and a simulation of a grid connected photovoltaic system using an output LCL filter are described in detail. In order to reduce the complexity of the system, a linear voltage and current controllers have been developed for a three phase grid connected inverter. Those controllers simultaneously regulate the dc link voltage (the photovoltaic power is delivered to the grid) and the current injected to the grid (to operate at unity power factor). The simulation results show the proposed methods work properly. Moreover they show that the control performance and dynamic behaviour of the inverter-LCL-grid combination. Simulation results show that the output LCL filter installed at the inverter output offer high harmonic attenuation.