Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EXPLORING FACEBOOK AND WHATSAPP AS SUPPORTING SOCIAL NETWORK APPLICATIONS FOR ENGLISH LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Facebook (FB) and Whatsapp (WA) have become the “communication portal” for social networking, which has rapidly transformed the way people communicate. It attempts to shed light on an information-sharing activity conducted via online discussion using FB and WA groups. This study investigated students’ participation in the online discussion and their feedback on the use of FB’sand WA’s groups as the platform for the activity.It explores ten domestic workers’ use of FB and WA as students in their English course at the Open University of Indonesia (UT). Drawing on virtual ethnography this article relies on qualitative data that shows there are potential positive benefits to using FB and WA for teaching and learning, particularly for the development of educational portable-communities. It is concluded that a FB’sand WA’s group has the potential to be used as online tutorial complements. They have pedagogical, social and technological affordances, which allow putting up announcements, sharing ideas and resources, and implementing online discussions. Using a FB’sand WA’s group as an online tutorial complement, however, has certain constraints. Participation of tutors and the role of admin of FB’s and WA’s group are crucial to realize its potential.
Test Refactoring: a Research Agenda

Research on software testing generally focusses on the e ↵ ectiveness of test suites to detect bugs. The quality of the test code in terms of maintainability remains mostly ignored. However, just like production code, test code can su ↵ er from code smells that imply refactoring opportunities. In this paper, we will summerize the state-of-the-art in the ﬁeld of test refactoring. We will show that there is a gap in the tool support, and pro-pose future work which will aim to ﬁll this gap.
Network and Embedded Applications of Automatic Speech Recognition

ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) is one of key technologies in the upcoming Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In this paper, first, the surveys on processing devices such as microprocessors and memories, and on communication infrastructure, especially wireless communication infrastructure relating to ASR are reported. Second, the embedded version of CSR (Continuous Speech Recognition) software for the mobile environmental use of ASR is reported. As the devices, RISC based microprocessors, semiconductor memories, and HDD are summarized. For the communication infrastructure, mobile communications and wireless LANs are described. Finally, implementation results of the free CSR software called Julius on the T-engineTM consisting of an SH-4A mi-croprocessor are reported.
Characterization of the vertical structure of Saharan dust export to the Mediterranean basin

We present the results of our investigations into the vertical structure of several North African dust plumes exported to the Mediterranean in 1997. Two backscatter lidar systems were operated in the western and eastern parts of the Mediterranean basin during dust events identified using Meteosat visible images. Dust transport soundings have shown that dust particles are trapped and transported inside well-defined layers in the free troposphere. In general, the dust transport appeared to be multilayered, with several distinct layers at different altitudes between 1.5 and 5 km. The analysis of Meteosat IR images, the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer aerosol index, and back-trajectories clearly shows that these layers have different origins in Africa. Finally, in addition to the free troposphere transport, the presence of dust particles inside the planetary boundary layer has been assessed and quantified for two particular events with aerosol optical thickness of 0.3–0.4. using simultaneous lidar and Sun photometer measurements. In one case only, significant dust load (dust optical thickness of ∼0.1) occurred in the boundary layer.
Low Cost Open Source Modal Virtual Environment Interfaces Using Full Body Motion Tracking and Hand Gesture Recognition

Marangoni, Matthew. M.S. C.E. G, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Wright State University, 2013. Low Cost Open Source Modal Virtual Environment Interfaces Using Full Body Motion Tracking and Hand Gesture Recognition. Virtual environments provide insightful and meaningful ways to explore data sets through immersive experiences. One of the ways immersion is achieved is through natural interaction methods instead of only a keyboard and mouse. Intuitive tracking systems for natural interfaces suitable for such environments are often expensive. Recently however, devices such as gesture tracking gloves and skeletal tracking systems have emerged in the consumer market. This project integrates gestural interfaces into an open source virtual reality toolkit using consumer grade input devices and generates a set of tools to enable multimodal gestural interface creation. The AnthroTronix AcceleGlove is used to augment body tracking data from a Microsoft Kinect with fine grained hand gesture data. The tools are found to be useful as a sample gestural interface is implemented using them. The project concludes by suggesting studies targeting gestural interfaces using such devices as well as other areas for further research.
Audit quality and independence in China: Evidence from Going-Concern Qualifications Issued During 2004-2007

This study examines the audit quality through the issuance of going-concern opinions by the independent auditors in the Chinese stock market. First, we find that Chinese auditors are more likely to issue going-concern opinions to firms with low liquidity, poor performance, less cash inflows and high leverage. Second, we document that audit fee from a particular client (i.e., the economic importance of a client) does not affect auditor’s qualified opinions, indicating the audit independence is not compromised by economic dependence. Finally, we compare the frequency of the issuance of going-concerns opinion between the Big four and non-Big four, and we do not find significant difference between two types of auditors, suggesting that the audit quality among domestic accounting firms is as good as the quality offered by the Big four. Overall, this paper suggests that the audit quality of the Chinese domestic CPA firms has significantly improved since 2000.
Implicit Forward Rents as Predictors of Future Rents

This paper investigates the relation between the term structure of rents and future spot rents. A rich database of office rental agreements for various maturities is used to estimate the term structure of rents, and from this structure implicit forward rents are extracted. The data pertain to commercial properties in the three largest Swedish cities for the period 1998-2002. A positive relation between forward and spot rents is found in some regions, but forward rents underestimate future rent levels. Another contribution of the paper lies in the area of rental index construction. We provide evidence that rental indices should not only be quality-constant (i.e. indices should not only control for the characteristics of rental units), but should also be maturity-constant.
hylogenetic characterization of a biogas plant microbial community integrating lone library 16 S-rDNA sequences and metagenome sequence data obtained y 454-pyrosequencing

The phylogenetic structure of the microbial community residing in a fermentation sample from a production-scale biogas plant fed with maize silage, green rye and liquid manure was analysed by an integrated approach using clone library sequences and metagenome sequence data obtained by 454pyrosequencing. Sequencing of 109 clones from a bacterial and an archaeal 16S-rDNA amplicon library revealed that the obtained nucleotide sequences are similar but not identical to 16S-rDNA database sequences derived from different anaerobic environments including digestors and bioreactors. Most of the bacterial 16S-rDNA sequences could be assigned to the phylum Firmicutes with the most abundant class Clostridia and to the class Bacteroidetes, whereas most archaeal 16S-rDNA sequences cluster close to the methanogen Methanoculleus bourgensis. Further sequences of the archaeal library most probably represent so far non-characterised species within the genus Methanoculleus. A similar result derived from phylogenetic analysis of mcrA clone sequences. The mcrA gene product encodes the -subunit of methyl-coenzyme-M reductase involved in the final step of methanogenesis. BLASTn analysis applying stringent settings resulted in assignment of 16S-rDNA metagenome sequence reads to 62 16S-rDNA amplicon sequences thus enabling frequency of abundance estimations for 16S-rDNA clone library sequences. Ribosomal Database Project (RDP) Classifier processing of metagenome 16S-rDNA reads revealed abundance of the phyla Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes and Euryarchaeota and the orders Clostridiales, Bacteroidales and Methanomicrobiales. Moreover, a large fraction of 16S-rDNA metagenome reads could not be assigned to lower taxonomic ranks, demonstrating that numerous microorganisms in the analysed fermentation sample of the biogas plant are still unclassified or unknown.
China's Accession to WTO and Shifts in the Agriculture Policy

The overall goal of our paper is to explore this question of how China's policy will likely respond as the nation enters the WTO. Specifically, we will have three objectives. First, we briefly review China's existing agriculture policy and past performance of China's agriculture and how it has changed during the past 20 years of reform. Next, we examine the main features of the agreement that China must adhere to as they enter WTO. Finally, we consider a number of possible ways that policy makers may respond, primarily focusing on the national government's viewpoint.
Three-terminal field effect devices utilizing thin film vanadium oxide as the channel layer

Electrostatic control of the metal-insulator transition (MIT) in an oxide semiconductor could potentially impact the emerging field of oxide electronics. Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is of particular interest due to the fact that the MIT happens in the vicinity of room temperature and it is considered to exhibit the Mott transition. We present a detailed account of our experimental investigation into three-terminal field effect transistor-like devices using thin film VO2 as the channel layer. The gate is separated from the channel through an insulating gate oxide layer, enabling true probing of the field effect with minimal or no interference from large leakage currents flowing directly from the electrode. The influence of the fabrication of multiple components of the device, including the gate oxide deposition, on the VO2 film characteristics is discussed. Further, we discuss the effect of the gate voltage on the device response, point out some of the unusual characteristics including temporal dependence. A re.
Lithospheric structures and Precambrian terrane boundaries in northeastern Botswana revealed through magnetotelluric profiling

[1] Within the framework of the Southern African Magnetotelluric Experiment a focused study was undertaken to gain improved knowledge of the lithospheric geometries and structures of the westerly extension of the Zimbabwe craton (ZIM) into Botswana, with the overarching aim of increasing our understanding of southern African tectonics. The area of interest is located in northeastern Botswana, where Kalahari sands cover most of the geological terranes and very little is known about lithospheric structures and thicknesses. Some of the regional-scale terrane boundary locations, defined based on potential field data, are not sufficiently accurate for local-scale studies. Investigation of the NNW-SSE orientated, 600 km long ZIM line profile crossing the Zimbabwe craton, Magondi mobile belt, and Ghanzi-Chobe belt showed that the Zimbabwe craton is characterized by thick (∼220 km) resistive lithosphere, consistent with geochemical and geothermal estimates from kimberlite samples of the nearby Orapa and Letlhakane pipes (∼175 km west of the profile). The lithospheric mantle of the Ghanzi-Chobe belt is resistive, but its lithosphere is only about 180 km thick. At crustal depths a northward dipping boundary between the Ghanzi-Chobe and the Magondi belts is identified, and two middle to lower crustal conductors are discovered in the Magondi belt. The crustal terrane boundary between the Magondi and Ghanzi-Chobe belts is found to be located further to the north, and the southwestern boundary of the Zimbabwe craton might be further to the west, than previously inferred from the regional potential field data.
The Effect of the Melatoninhormone on the Performance of the Ovaries in Naimi Sheep when Exposed to Different Periods of Light

The study of the hormone melatonin and hormone progesterone in the serum of the blood of Naimi ewes sheep is carried sheep by exposing groups of ewes to different periods of industrial light between May and the end of August just before the beginning of the normal breeding season. The results showed that melatonin concentration when the group exposed to short photoperiods (8L: 16D), was the highest and reached (60.55±1.55) pg / ml compared to the control group prone to natural lighting where melatonin hormone concentration scored (39.77 ± 3.57) pg / ml. The differences of concentrations of the hormone melatonin are significant when compared to other groups in the last two weeks while reaching the average concentration of melatonin values in the group, which is subjected to a long period of light (16L: 8D) to the lows (36.66 ± 4.86) pg / ml and similarly with the concentrations of the hormoneprogesterone which it was at its lowest point in a long group (0.29 ± 0.39) ng / ml while it was at the top level in the short group (0.66 ± 0.76)ng / ml. The results obtained showed a positive correlation between the internal origin melatonin concentration hormone and the length of the optical period and increase reproductive efficiency when Naimi sheep exposed to short photoperiods compared to control groups exposed to longer photoperiod.
KOM Towards a Minimally Supervised Ontology Learning System based on Word Embeddings and Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper introduces Onto.KOM: a minimally supervised ontology learning system which minimizes the reliance on complicated feature engineering and supervised linguistic modules for constructing the different consecutive components of an ontology, potentially providing domain independent and fully automatic ontology learning system. The focus here is to fill in the gap between automatically identifying the different ontological categories reflecting the domain of interest and the extraction and classification of semantic relations between the concepts under the different categories. In Onto.KOM, we depart from traditional approaches with intensive linguistic analysis and manual feature engineering for relation classification by introducing a convolutional neural network (CNN) that automatically learns features from word-pair offset in the vector space. The experimental results show that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art systems for relation classification in terms of F1-measure.
Managing Requirements Risks: A Value-Based Process

The technological, cost, people and schedule issues faced during software development, make it vulnerable for several types of risks. The requirements’ related risks are one of the most occurring risks. If remain unnoticed or unmanaged, the requirements related risks can cost a project greatly, financially and otherwise. It is extremely important to manage requirements related risks efficiently and effectively. Moreover, a project can never be successful if stakeholders do not get their “valued” things. Every requirement contributes towards some value for stakeholder(s). Therefore it is important to manage requirements risks to the satisfaction of stakeholders. Different stakeholders have different perception of risk, it is therefore necessary to have a process that not only manages requirements’ risks but it also fulfills the values of stakeholders as well. This chapter presents a Value-Based Requirements Risk Management (VRRM) process that is designed (Samad et al., 2008) to manage requirements related risks in a value based manner.
ANTIOSTEOPOROTIC ACTIVITY OF ANTHRAQUINONE ISOLATED FROM MORINDA CITRIFOLIA FRUITS IN RATS

Objectives: This study was designed to investigate the antiosteoporotic activity of isolated anthraquinones from Morinda citrifolia fruit extract in ovariectomy (OVX) induced osteoporotic rats. Methods: All the rats were divided into 4 groups (n=6 each). Group I (sham control) received vehicle, p.o. , Group II OVX control (vehicle, p.o.), Group III was OVX+standard raloxifene (5.4 mg/kg, p.o.), and Group IV was OVX+Physcion (100 mg/kg, p.o.) for 90 days. Results: The daily oral administration of isolated compound physcion (100 mg/kg) for 12 weeks to the rats prevented OVX-induced osteoporosis. This was examined by serum biomarkers such as alkaline phosphatase, calcium, and tartrate resistant acid phosphatase and showed significant effects (p<0.0001). The femur bone strength assessed by three-point bending test showed improved bone strength in physcion treated rats, and this was supported by enhanced bone mineral density (p<0.05). The ash parameters of femur bone studied from physcion treated rats exhibited a significant (p<0.0001) value of ash weight followed by ash calcium content. Further, femur bone histological examination revealed the protective effect of the compound physcion (100 mg/kg) against OVX-induced bone loss in rats, where it showed mineralization of trabecular spaces, improved bone compactness thereby intact bone architecture. Conclusion: This study concludes that the isolated anthraquinone physcion had a preventive effect against OVX-induced bone loss in rats. Keywords: Morinda citrifolia, Physcion, Osteoporosis, Bone mineral density, Ash mineral content.
Overlapping Political Budget Cycles in the Legislative and the Executive

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it is important whether the incumbent re-runs. To account for the potential endogeneity associated with this decision, we apply a unique instrumental variables approach based on age and pension eligibility rules. We find sizable and significant effects in expenditures before council elections and before joint elections when the incumbent re-runs.
Examining Tests for Comparing Survival Curves with Right Censored Data

Abstract Background and objective In survival analysis, estimating the survival probability of a population is important, but on the other hand, investigators want to compare the survival experiences of different groups. In such cases, the differences can be illustrated by drawing survival curves, but this will only give a rough idea. Since the data obtained from survival studies contains frequently censored observations some specially designed tests are required in order to compare groups statistically in terms of survival. Methods In this study, Logrank, Gehan-Wilcoxon, Tarone-Ware, Peto-Peto, Modified Peto-Peto tests and tests belonging to Fleming-Harrington test family with (p, q) values; (1, 0), (0.5, 0.5), (1, 1), (0, 1) ve (0.5, 2) are examined by means of Type I error rate obtained from a simulation study, which is conducted in the cases where the event takes place with equal probability along the follow-up time. Results As a result of the simulation study, Type I error rate of Logrank test is equal or close to the nominal value. Conclusions When survival data were generated from lognormal and inverse Gaussian distribution, Type I error rate of Gehan-Wilcoxon, Tarone-Ware, Peto-Peto, Modified Peto-Peto and Fleming-Harrington (1,0) tests were close to the nominal value.
Are there political cycles hidden inside government expenditures?

Abstract This article examines the presence of political cycles inside the Portuguese governments’ aggregate expenditures by using annual data for 10 expenditure components. The results indicate that the choice of the expenditure components to be increased during election periods by Portuguese governments generally relates to more visible items such as general public services, social protection and health care.
In Vitro Screening of α-Amylase Inhibition by Selected Terpenes from Essential Oils

Purpose: To assess some terpenes from herbal products for possible inhibitory effects on serum αamylase in order to ascertain their potential usefulness in the prevention and/or treatment of diabetes Type 2. Methods: Solutions of terpenes (citral, eukalyptol, β-pinene, myrcene, eugenol and terpineol) in deonized water were prepared by ultrasonic and manual mixing in four different concentrations ranging from 0.39 ‐ 5.50 µmol cm -3 . Commercial sera (with normal-N and high-H enzyme activity) were used as a source of α-amylase. α-Amylase activity was determined by standard methods using an automated analyzer. Results: All the selected terpenes at their maximal concentrations inhibited α-amylase in N-sera in the range 9.68 ‐ 38.70 and 10.71 - 25.00 % for ultrasonic and manual mixing, respectively, while in H-sera, inhibition was in the range 17.10 - 21.05 and 13.58 ‐ 25.92 % for ultrasonic and manual mixing, respectively. Regardless of the concentration of the inhibitor or the method of mixing, citral was the strongest inhibitor of α-amylase. Conclusion: The selected terpenes, in their appropriate concentrations, influence α-amylase activity to varying degrees. Principal component and agglomerative hierarchical analysis reveal that the most significant factor in α-amylase inhibition is the mode of mixing the samples, rather than their concentrations.
Social and Environmental Determinants of Risk and Uncertainties Reporting

Recently, risk reporting has gained interest in financial reporting practice, regulation, and internationalresearch. Social and environmental reporting is seen to benefit shareholders more byreducing risk than by increasing return. The researchers showed that the annual report is themost favoured channel of disclosure, along with presentation to investors. The general messageis that, as far as annual reports go, quantified, verifiable disclosures have the most credibilityand relevance. Our paper is meant to develop an analysis of specific requirements regardingrisks and uncertainties reported into the financial statements according to different standards(US-GAAP, IFRS, and European Directives) and their connection to social and environmentalinformation that an entity should disclose. We focus on fundamental research that is related toinductive accounting theory and uses scientific methods for identification of corporate reportingtheoretical and practical difficulties in European and international economic entities. Â Copyright Â© www.iiste. org
Hedging with Regret

This paper investigates corporate hedging under regret aversion. Regret-averse firms try to avoid deviations of their hedging policy from the ex post best policy, an intuitive consideration if one has to justify one's decisions afterward. The study presents a model of a firm that faces uncertain prices and seeks to hedge both profit risk and regret risk with derivatives. It characterizes optimal hedge positions and shows that regret aversion leads to stronger incentives to hedge downside price risk than standard expected utility theory. In the profit region of the price distribution, however, regret aversion reduces the hedging of price risk to avoid large regret in the case of increasing prices. The results show that regret aversion has a strong effect on the choice of the hedging instrument and provides a preference-based explanation for the use of options in corporate risk management.