Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Current global warming appears anomalous in relation to the climate of the last 20 000 years

To distinguish between natural and anthropogenic forcing, the supposedly ongoing global warming needs to be put in a longer, geological perspective. When the last ca. 20 000 yr of climate development is reviewed, including the climatically dramatic period when the Last Ice Age ended, the Last Termination, it appears that the last centuries of globally rising temperatures should be regarded as an anomaly. Other, often synchronous climate events are not expressed in a globally consistent way, but rather are the expression of the complexities of the climate system. Due to the often poor precision in the dating of older proxy records, such a statement will obviously be met with some opposition. However, as long as no globally consistent climate event prior to today’s global warming has been clearly documented, and considering that climate trends during the last millennia in different parts of the world have, in the last century or so, changed direction into a globally warming trend, we ought to regard the ongoing changes as anomalies, triggered by anthropogenically forced alterations of the carbon cycle in the general global environment.
An Empirical Study of Accounting Software Acceptance among Bengkulu City Students

The objective of the study was to analyse the acceptance of the accounting software by accounting students using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The results of this research were generated using the variables - the perceived ease of use, the perceived usefulness, the attitude towards using, the behavioural intention to use, and the actual system usage. These variables were analysed using the Structural Equation Model (SEM). The samples of this research were 162 accounting students who were able to operate accounting software (such as MYOB and GL) at Bengkulu City, Bengkulu Province, Indonesia. The results show that the perceived ease of use had a positive significant effect on the perceived usefulness, while the perceived usefulness had a positive significant effect on the behavioural intention to use and the behavioural intention to use had a positive significant effect on the actual system usage of the accounting software.
CUSTOMER INTENTION TOWARD THEME PARK: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF SERVICE QUALITY AND EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING ON THE IMPACT OF CUSTOMER ATTITUDE

Dunia Fantasi (Dufan) located in Taman Impian Jaya Ancol is one leading recreational unit with specific characteristics as a theme park. A research was done towards with service quality and implementation of experiential marketing applied in Dufan using path analysis. Experiential marketing was studied to have a direct effect, positive and significant impact on customer attitude variables. The basic objective of this research is to determine the effect of service quality and implementation of experiential marketing to customer attitude and its impact on customer intention of Dufan. Data collection was conducted through questionnaire given to Dufan visitors. From the results of data analysis we found that service quality has not significantly influenced customer’s attitude. The study revealed that the direct effect between experiential marketing and customer intention is 'strong’. As a subsequent finding, service quality has not given a significant effect on customer intention. However, experiential marketing was found having an indirect influence on customer intention mediated by attitude, in which the results of the study suggested that the indirect effect is 'strong'. Eventually, customer attitude has a direct positive and significant impact on customer intention variables. The direct influence of customer attitude to customer intention in Fantasy World,was 'strong'.
DNN-GRU Multiple Layers for VAD in PC Game Cafe

In this paper, we present multi-layer networks based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs; also known as Dense layer or fully connected layer) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) for Voice Activity Detection (VAD) with temporal smoothing in noisy PC game cafe environments. The noise from PC game cafe has distinctive features from previous VAD studies. To improve the accuracy of VAD in noisy environments, we recommend multi-layer neural networks with the fusion of DNNs and GRUs. DNNs were used as the first layer and last one because DNNs are good at mapping features and performing class-based discrimination. In order to take advantage of time sequence modeling such as speech, we used GRU We show that our model made better performance for the PC game cafe noisy environment compared to using only DNNs and GRUs.
The Contribution of Fruit and Vegetable Consumption to Human Health

Increasing incidences of some chronic diseases, including cancer and cardiovascular disease, especially in industrial countries, have raised awareness regarding the importance of diet (Erbersdobler 2003). It is estimated that one-third of the cancer cases and up to half of cardiovascular disease cases are thought to be diet related (Goldberg 1994). Numerous epidemiological studies have shown an inverse association between fruit and vegetable consumption and chronic diseases, including different types of cancer and cardiovascular disease (Hirayama 1990; Block and others 1992; Howe and others 1992; Steinmetz and Potter 1991, 1996; World Cancer Research Fund 1997; Joshipura and others 2001; Bazzano and others 2002; Kris-Etherton and others 2002). These studies have shown mounting evidence that people who avoid fruit and vegetables completely, or who consume very little, are indeed at increased risk of these diseases. Therefore, interest in the health benefits of fruit and vegetable consumption is increasing, and the interest in understanding the type, number, and mode of action of the different components in fruits and vegetables that confer health benefits is also increasing. Fruits and vegetables have historically been considered rich sources of some essential dietary micronutrients and fibers, and more recently they have been recognized as important sources for a wide array of phytochemicals that individually, or in combination, may benefit health (Stavric 1994; Rechkemmer 2001). Therefore, some people have conferred on fruits and vegetables the status of “functional foods. ” There are many biologically plausible reasons for this potentially protective association, including the fact that many of the phytochemicals act as antioxidants. Phytochemicals present in fruits and vegetables are very diverse, such as ascorbic acid, carotenoids, and phenolic compounds (Liu 2004; Percival and others 2006; Syngletary and others 2005; Yahia and others 2001a, 2001b). Plant polyphenols are ubiquitous in the diet, with rich sources being tea, wine, fruits, and vegetables; they demonstrate considerable antioxidative activity in vitro, which can have important implications for health (Duthie and others 2000). Naturally occurring compounds such as phytochemicals, which possess anticarcinogenic and other beneficial properties, are referred to as chemopreventers. One of the predominant mechanisms of their protective action is due to their antioxidant activity and the capacity to scavenge free radicals. Among the most investigated chemopreventers are some vitamins, plant polyphenols, and pigments such as carotenoids, chlorophylls, flavonoids, and betalains. Resolution of the potential protective roles of
Application of Meshfree Method to Elastic-Plastic Fracture Mechanics Parameter Analysis

The element-free Galerkin (EFG) method is applied to the calculation of elasticplastic fracture mechanics parameters such as the J-integral and T*-integral. The fields of displacement, strain and stress for a crack problem are obtained using the elastic-plastic EFG method. Then the elastic-plastic fracture mechanics parameters J-integral and T*-integral are calculated from path and domain integrals. In the finite element analysis, paths for the path integral and domains for the domain integral are selected depending on finite element mesh division. On the other hand, they can be arbitrarily selected in the EFG method, and we can use a simple integral path and domain such as a circular shape surrounding a crack tip, which can provide efficient numerical integral formulae for the path and domain integrals. In a crack growth problem, the simple integral path and domain can easily move together with the crack tip, as the crack tip advances. This paper presents a method for calculating the J-integral and T*integral in a framework of the EFG method. The proposed method is applied to both a stationary crack problem and a stable crack growth problem. The results obtained from the EFG method are compared with those of the finite element method and experiments to show the effectiveness of the EFG method to the elastic-plastic fracture mechanics parameter analysis. Keyword: meshfree method, element-free Galerkin method, fracture mechanics parameter, elasto-plastic, T*-integral. 1 Saga University, Saga, Saga, JAPAN 2 Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries, Yokohama, Kanagawa, JAPAN 3 Kyoto University, Kyoto, Kyoto, JAPAN
OSTEOPROTECTIVE MEDICINAL PLANTS - PART 1 (A HUMAN CLINICAL EVIDENCE-BASED REVIEW)

Background. Osteoporosis is a bone metabolic disease affecting a large percentage of aging population, which leads to an increased risk of fractures and has a negative impact on life quality. The available treatments for osteoporosis are effective, but are associated with several severe adverse reactions, hence the interest for alternative treatments devoid of such redoubtable side effects. Medicinal plants represent a viable resource for new therapeutic agents. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview about the medicinal plants that have been reported to have anti-osteoporotic effects in human clinical studies. Materials and Methods. Relevant studies found in PubMed database, pertaining to efficacy in humans, mechanism of action, osteoactive phytochemicals and safety, were selected. For the inquiry, keywords such as “medicinal plant”, “osteoporosis”, “bone”, “fracture”, “osteoclast” and “osteoblast” were used in various combinations. The information extracted was integrated with the traditional knowledge on the correspondent medicinal plants. Results. Eight medicinal plants (Cimicifuga racemosa, Cissus quadrangularis, Eleutherococcus senticosus, Epimedium spp., Glycine max, Pueraria spp., Panax notoginseng, Salvia milthiorriza) were selected. Mechanisms involved include the activation of osteoblasts, inhibition of osteoclastogenesis, estrogen-like activity, anti-inflammatory activity, inhibition of collagen degradation by cathepsin K. Conclusion. Several medicinal plants have been included in clinical studies successfully targeting osteoporosis, thus showing the potential to modulate bone resorption and bone formation.
Taking : Self Control . Skill Development : * Spontaneous Behavior IDENTIFIERS

This study examines the ssibility that ability to avoid detection cf deceptive behavior via nonverbal behavior might be related to an individual's role-taking skill. Sixty-one 5 to 12 year-old boys and girls were led to be verbally deceptive or truthful by saying that they either had enjoyed or not enjoyed an unpleasant experience or had enjoyed or not enjoyed a pleasant experience. Untrained adult judges then rated whether they thought the children were being truthful or deceptive. It was hypothesized that the children's role-taking skill would be positively correlated with their ability to avoid detection by the adult judges. Results indicate a positive relationship between the ability to take the perspective of others and success at avoiding detection. The awareness that one's nonverbal behavior during social interaction has an impact on the perception of others appears to be an important factor influending the abili'v to control nonverbal cues. Children who are better able to take the perspective of others in the role-taking task were also more effective at controlling their nonverbal behavior. (Author/MP1
Sustainability Reporting and Performances of the Companies in the Istanbul Stock Exchange Sustainability Index

In today's business world, in which it is difficult to survive, the economic life of products, services or knowledge is considerably reduced. Competitors produce similar products or extrafeatured ones instantly. In this environment, the contribution of companies to the social and economic environment is a preferred criterion by consumers alongside products or services. Therefore, consumers need to obtain more detailed information about companies. Besides, this drastic change in the market encourages companies to become sustainable. Sustainable business means the company puts consumed products back. Corporate sustainability, corresponds to sustainability at the level of the company, and gives equal importance to company growth and profitability together with environmental and social issues. The BIST Sustainability Index started to be calculated by the Istanbul Stock Exchange (BIST) in 2014 to evaluate the sustainability performance of companies in Turkey. The main objective of this study is to present the importance of sustainability reports in Turkey. To this aim, the performances of 15 companies in the BIST Sustainability Index were compared the periods before and after entering the index. On the other hand, sustainability reporting practices should be encouraged to increase studies on this issue. In this context, to remain on the agenda of the issue is a further objective of this study. To achieve these objectives, the financial data of the companies in the period before and after entering to the BIST Sustainability Index were analyzed using t-test in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) package. The results of the study showed that no significant difference between the performances of the companies in terms of the net profit margin, the return on assets and equity capital in these periods could be found. Therefore, it can be said that insufficient importance is given to sustainability issues in Turkey. The reasons for this situation might be considered as a lack of awareness due to the recent introduction and calculation of the index. It is expected that the awareness of firms and investors about sustainability will increase, and that they will demonstrate the necessary importance to this issue over time. Keywords—BIST sustainability index, firm performance, sustainability, sustainability reporting. Zeynep Şahin is with the Accounting and Tax Department, Vakfıkebir Vocational School, Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey (e-mail: ktuzeynepsahin@gmail.com). Züleyha Yılmaz is with the Business Administration Department, Unye Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ordu University, Ordu, Turkey (e-mail: zuleyhayilmaz@odu.edu.tr). Fikret Çankaya, corresponding author, is with the Business Administration Department, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey (phone: +90-462-377-3147; fax: +90462-325-7281; e-mail: cankayaf@yahoo.com).
Air Pollution Mix and Emergency Room Visits for Respiratory and Cardiac Diseases in Taipei

To clarify the contribution of ambient air pollutants to acute health effects, we examined the association between daily air pollution lev- els and emergency room (ER) visits for respiratory and cardiac diseases in Taipei City, Taiwan from January 1997 to December 1998. Average daily concentrations of particulate matter less than 2.5 µm in aerodynamic diam- eter (PM2.5), PM10, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone were obtained from ambient air quality monitoring stations. The daily counts of ER visits stratified by diagnosis and age were modeled by both single-pollutant and multi-pollutant Poisson regression models with adjust- ment of confounding factors to evaluate the effects of individual pollutants. A mixture model was constructed by adding ratios of the pollutants to the multi-pollutant model to examine the air pollution mixture on ER visits. The single-pollutant models showed that an interquartile range change of PM2.5 (16 µg/m 3 ) was associated with increased ER visits for respiratory disease in all age groups, with relative risks 1.04 to 1.06 and increased ER visits for cardiac disease in adult and elderly age groups, with a relative risk of 1.05. Gaseous pollutants, mainly NO2 and CO, were also associated with increased visits by children for respiratory disease and visits by adults and elderly individuals for cardiac disease. Examination of joint effect of mixes of PM2.5 and gaseous pollutants showed that an interquartile range increase was associated with increases in ER visits by children for respiratory disease and by adults for cardiac disease, with a relative risk of 1.09.
Formation of Toxic Amyloid Fibrils by Amyloid β-Protein on Ganglioside Clusters

It is widely accepted that the conversion of the soluble, nontoxic amyloid β-protein (Aβ) monomer to aggregated toxic Aβ rich in β-sheet structures is central to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. However, the mechanism of the abnormal aggregation of Aβ in vivo is not well understood. Accumulating evidence suggests that lipid rafts (microdomains) in membranes mainly composed of sphingolipids (gangliosides and sphingomyelin) and cholesterol play a pivotal role in this process. This paper summarizes the molecular mechanisms by which Aβ aggregates on membranes containing ganglioside clusters, forming amyloid fibrils. Notably, the toxicity and physicochemical properties of the fibrils are different from those of Aβ amyloids formed in solution. Furthermore, differences between Aβ-(1–40) and Aβ-(1–42) in membrane interaction and amyloidogenesis are also emphasized.
Nonperforming Loans in the GCC Banking System and Their Macroeconomic Effects

According to a dynamic panel estimated over 1995-2008 on around 80 banks in the GCC region, the NPL ratio worsens as economic growth becomes lower and interest rates and risk aversion increase. Our model implies that the cumulative effect of macroeconomic shocks over a three year horizon is indeed large. Firm-specific factors related to risk-taking and efficiency are also related to future NPLs. The paper finally investigates the feedback effect of increasing NPLs on growth using a VAR model. According to the panel VAR, there could be a strong, albeit short-lived feedback effect from losses in banks’ balance sheets on economic activity, with a semi-elasticity of around '34.
Disinformative data in large-scale hydrological modelling

Abstract. Large-scale hydrological modelling has become an important tool for the study of global and regional water resources, climate impacts, and water-resources management. However, modelling efforts over large spatial domains are fraught with problems of data scarcity, uncertainties and inconsistencies between model forcing and evaluation data. Model-independent methods to screen and analyse data for such problems are needed. This study aimed at identifying data inconsistencies in global datasets using a pre-modelling analysis, inconsistencies that can be disinformative for subsequent modelling. The consistency between (i) basin areas for different hydrographic datasets, and (ii) between climate data (precipitation and potential evaporation) and discharge data, was examined in terms of how well basin areas were represented in the flow networks and the possibility of water-balance closure. It was found that (i) most basins could be well represented in both gridded basin delineations and polygon-based ones, but some basins exhibited large area discrepancies between flow-network datasets and archived basin areas, (ii) basins exhibiting too-high runoff coefficients were abundant in areas where precipitation data were likely affected by snow undercatch, and (iii) the occurrence of basins exhibiting losses exceeding the potential-evaporation limit was strongly dependent on the potential-evaporation data, both in terms of numbers and geographical distribution. Some inconsistencies may be resolved by considering sub-grid variability in climate data, surface-dependent potential-evaporation estimates, etc., but further studies are needed to determine the reasons for the inconsistencies found. Our results emphasise the need for pre-modelling data analysis to identify dataset inconsistencies as an important first step in any large-scale study. Applying data-screening methods before modelling should also increase our chances to draw robust conclusions from subsequent model simulations.
Coupled Autoencoder Based Reconstruction of Images from Compressively Sampled Measurements

This work addresses the problem of reconstructing images from their lower dimensional random projections using Coupled Autoencoder (CAE). Traditionally, Compressed Sensing (CS) based techniques have been employed for this task. CS based techniques are iterative in nature; hence inversion process is time-consuming and cannot be deployed for the real-time reconstruction process. These inversion processes are transductive in nature. With the recent development in deep learning - auto encoders, CNN based architectures have been used for learning inversion in an inductive setup. The training period for inductive learning is large but is very fast during application. But these approaches work only on the signal domain and not on the measurement domain. We show the application of CAE, which can work directly from the measurement domain. We compare CAE with a Dictionary learning based coupling setup and a recently proposed CNN based CS reconstruction algorithm. We show reconstruction capability of CAE in terms of PSNR and SSIM on a standard set of images with measurement rates of 0.04 and 0.25.
Using knowledge anchors to facilitate user exploration of data graphs

This paper investigates how to facilitate users’ exploration through data graphs. The prime focus is on knowledge utility, i.e. increasing a user’s domain knowledge while exploring a data graph, which is crucial in the vast number of user-facing semantic web applications where the users are not experts in the domain. We introduce a highly unique exploration support mechanism underpinned by the subsumption theory for meaningful learning. A core algorithmic component for operationalising the subsumption theory for meaningful learning is the automatic identification of knowledge anchors in a data graph (KADG). We present several metrics for identifying KADG which are evaluated against familiar concepts in human cognitive structures. The second key component is a subsumption algorithm that utilises KADG for generating exploration paths for knowledge expansion. The implementation of the algorithm is applied in the context of a Semantic data browser in a music domain. The resultant exploration paths are evaluated in a task-driven experimental user study compared to free data graph exploration. The findings show that exploration paths, based on subsumption and using knowledge anchors, lead to significantly higher increase in the users’ conceptual knowledge and better usability than free exploration of data graphs. The work opens a new avenue in semantic data exploration which investigates the link between learning and knowledge exploration. We provide the first framework that adopts educational theories to inform data graph exploration for knowledge expansion which extends the value of exploration and enables broader applications of data graphs in systems where the end users are not experts in the specific domain.
Rethinking Compressive Sensing

In this paper we show that Compressive Sensing (CS) can be casted as an impulse response estimation problem. Using this interpretation we re-obtain some theoretical results of CS in a simple manner. Moreover, we prove that in the case of a randomly generated sensing matrix, reconstruction probability depends on the kurtosis of the distribution used for its generation.