Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ISO 14001 certification in developing countries: motivations from trade and environment

This article aims to investigate the influences of trade and environmental issues on ISO 14001 certification in developing countries, focusing on how ISO 14001 certification is affected at macrolevel. Based on the panel data from 65 developing countries over the period 1999–2016, this study confirms the existence of long-run cointegrating relationships between ISO 14001 adoption, trade openness, and environmental pressures by using panel estimation techniques. The results from fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) reveal the positive impacts of trade openness and environmental pressures on ISO 14001 adoption. The results from causality analysis show no causal relationship between ISO 14001, trade openness, and environmental pressures in whole panel; instead the relationship varies for different regions of developing countries.
Fabrication of superhydrophobic surfaces based on PDMS coated hydrothermal grown ZnO on PET fabrics

Abstract Wetting behavior of Zinc Oxide (ZnO) based nanomaterials has been the subject of intense investigations and is an active research field for various engineering applications and modifying the surface wettability of ZnO is of great interest. In this study, one-dimensional (1 D) semiconducting ZnO nanorods are grown on a superhydrophobic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fabric using a hydrothermal method. A facile polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) coating is applied onto the ZnO grown PET fabrics to improve the hydrophobicity. A wide range of characterization techniques such as field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV-vis spectroscopy and contact angle measurement are used to explore the morphology and wetting behavior of the as-prepared samples. The measured water contact angle (WCA) is >150° indicating its superhydrophobicity. This study reports an efficient way to obtain highly hydrophobic semiconducting ZnO grown on PET fabric, which can be of great interest for many future applications.
What type of nonprofit organization is preferred in government contracting in China?

Government contracting with nonprofit organizations in service delivery has become a widespread practice in the public administration landscape. This research explores what kinds of nonprofits are more likely to receive government funding for service delivery. Viewing nonprofits’ pursuit of government funding as an interorganizational effort, we examine the contextual and organizational factors that influence nonprofits’ receipt of government funding. Using the data collected from a nationwide survey of Chinese nonprofits, we find a close contractual relationship between government and nonprofits. Further analysis suggests that policy advocacy, board co-optation, external competition, and organizational formalization have positive impacts on leveraging government funding, while interorganizational collaboration and organizational professionalization do not appear to play a significant role. To our knowledge, this study represents the first nationwide survey research on government–nonprofit contracting in China. The findings expand the literature by adding new empirical evidence from an authoritarian context. Points for practitioners This study examines the contextual and organizational factors affecting Chinese nonprofit organizations’ receipt of purchase-of-service contracts from government. The results indicate that nonprofit organizations engaging in more policy advocacy activities, having more people with government working experience on governing boards, facing stronger competition in resource acquisition and service delivery from operating environments, and embracing more formal structures and procedures in organizational operations would receive more government contracts.
Loose Hand Gesture Recognition Based on Relational Features Using a Depth Sensor

—Hand gesture recognition ( HGR ) in real-time and with precision has become an important research topic. In this article, a loose hand gesture recognition ( LHGR ) system based on relational features using a depth sensor is implemented, which not only maintains an impressive accuracy in real-time processing but also enables the user to use loose gestures. HGR can usually be divided into three stages: hand detection, hand feature extraction, and gesture classification. However, the method we propose has been useful in improving all the stages of HGR . In the hand detection stage, we propose a ROI dynamic estimation method and a wrist-cutting method that conform to the characteristics of a human hand. In the feature extraction stage, we use the more reliable relational features which are constructed by local features, global features, and depth coding. In the gesture classification stage, we use three layers of classifiers including finger counting, finger name matching, and coding comparison; these layers are used to classify 16 kinds of hand gestures. In the end, the final output is adjusted by an adaptive decision. The average processing speed per frame is 38.6 ms. Using our method has resulted in an average accuracy of standard gestures of about 98.29%, and an average accuracy of loose gestures of about 88.32%. In summary, our LHGR system can robustly classify hand gestures and still achieve acceptable results for loose gestures.
Factors Influencing Problem-Based Learning: Students’ and Teachers’ Perspectives

Aim: Problem-based learning (PBL) is a widely accepted teaching and learning method being used in most accredited medical schools. Phramongkutklao College of Medicine routinely utilized this powerful method. This paper involves the use of problem-based learning in teaching malaria session during parasitology course. From our experience, there is a number of contributing factor to the success of PBL. The objective of this study is to critically explore students and teachers' perspectives on factors influencing PBL at our institution.
Modelling Gasoline Demand in Ghana: A Structural Time Series Analysis

Concerns about the role of energy consumption in global warming have led to policy designs that seek to reduce fossil fuel consumption or find a less polluting alternative especiallyfor the transport sector. This study seeks to estimate the elasticities of price, income, education and technology on transport gasoline demand sector inGhana. The Structural Time Series Model reports a short-run price and income elasticities of -0.0088 and 0.713. Total factor productivity is -0.408 whilstthe elasticity for education is 2.33. In the long run, the reported price and income elasticities are -0.065 and 5.129 respectively. The long run elasticityfor productivity is -2.935. The study recommends that in order to enhanceefficiency in gasoline consumption in the transport sector, there should beinvestment in productivity.
Service management principles for hospitality and tourism

Thank you very much for downloading service management principles for hospitality and tourism. As you may know, people have search hundreds times for their chosen books like this service management principles for hospitality and tourism, but end up in malicious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they cope with some infectious bugs inside their computer.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL VISITORS TO GASTRONOMIC EVENTS: CASE STUDY OF ISTRIA, CROATIA

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of events in the tourism offer of Istria, with a particular accent on an analysis of the selected gastronomic events. By this paper, the intention is to determine whether there is a difference between domestic and foreign visitors to gastronomic events in all listed goals; therefore, the main research question reads: Is there a difference in the satisfaction and experiences of event visitors depending on whether they are domestic or foreign? Methodology – The research was conducted during the period of eight months in 2016, between April and November. Primary data was collected through a self-completed questionnaire, by surveying visitors in 22 different gastronomic events, in 22 different tourism destinations in Istria. During the course of the research, 1,227 respondents were surveyed, both domestic and foreign event visitors. The research methodology was based on a fundamental approach which includes the use of descriptive analyses. Findings – By analysing the experiences of gastronomic event visitors, it is determined that 80.1% of the respondents realised a memorable experience. Domestic visitors are the most satisfied with the diversity of the gastronomic offer, while they are the least satisfied with the prices. It is completely opposite with foreign guests; they are satisfied with the prices, but less satisfied with what is on offer. Contribution – Based on the research, five most frequent challenges are identified which event organisers come across and which relate to gastronomic, but also to other kinds of events.
Explore fine-grained discriminative visual explanation when making classification decision

Language and image are two most important media for describing surrounding world. Fine-grained visual explanations are helpful for people to understand the reasons or motivation of vision system when it makes classification decision. Base on the pioneer work of Lisa, this paper proposes a new model for discriminative visual explanation generation. It extracts res5c image features from deep residual network and uses multimodal compact bilinear strategy for multimodal information fusion. Selective attention mechanism is introduced to focus on visual parts that are most related to the predicted category information. The proposed network both considers spatial distribution of image content and fusion strategy that better model different modal information. The result on CUB Bird Dataset shows that our model can improve the quality of the explanation statement, which indicates that our proposed network is effective.
Quantified Comparison of Uterine Electrical Activity during Active Labor at various locations nn Abdominal Surface: A Preliminary Study

Electrohysterography or the study of the electrical propagation patterns of the uterine contractile activity when combined with modern computing capabilities can prove to be a powerful tool in obstetric care. In this preliminary study the electrical activity during labor contractions was compared quantitatively at various locations on the abdominal surface. Data was collected from 10 participants for about 30 minutes using 7 electrodes mono-polar configuration. The electrical activity was found to be concentrated along the umbilical axis. The center of the electrical activity was found to be non-stationary and move from the lower to the upper uterine segment as the contraction intensified. The quantified electrical activity at various locations may serve as a template for placement of electrodes for future studies.
Analisa Sentimen Untuk Penilaian Pelayanan Situs Belanja Online Menggunakan Algoritma Naïve Bayes

Situs online marketplace merupakan tempat belanja yang saat ini digemari masyarakat karena menawarkan berbagai kemudahan. Sebagian masyarakat puas dengan pelayanan yang diberikan situs online marketplace yang mereka pilih dan sebagian lagi tidak. Respon yang diberikan konsumen tentang pelayanan situs online marketplace biasanya di ungkapkan melalui media sosial, salah satunya adalah twitter. Pada penelitian ini dilakukan analisis sentimen terhadap postingan opini pelanggan online marketplace di Indonesia pada twitter yang nantinya bisa digunakan untuk menentukan rating online marketplace agar masyarakat tidak salah pilih situs marketplace untuk berbelanja di masa depan. Langkah pertama melakukan koleksi data opini masyarakat di twitter dari situs belanja online. Kemudian dilakukan pre-processing pada data yang meliputi cleansing data, case folding, tokenizing, case normalization, stop word, convert negation dan stemming. Selanjutnya dilakukan proses pemberian label (kelas) pada data tersebut yang dilakukan oleh ahli bahasa. Hasil dari proses clustering tercipta dua kelas data yaitu kelas data positif dan kelas data negatif dengan jumlah total 1200 data. Data yang sudah memiliki kelas data ini, digunakan sebagai data training untuk mesin pengklasifikasi, dalam riset ini menggunakan algoritma mesin pengklasifikasi Naive Bayes. Terakhir, kami mengukur kinerja dari mesin pengklasifikasi menggunakan 10-fold cross validation. Hasil evaluasi menunjukkan rata-rata akurasi sebesar 93.33%.
The Application of Interactive Comprehensible Written Input-Output Instruction for Teaching Writing

This study was aimed at finding out whether there was a difference on students' writing ability in general as well as students' aspects of writing in particular and exploringwhether there would be a difference on students' prediction of Narrative and Anecdote Text as a part of Interactive Comprehensible Written Input-Output Instruction.The study involved 36 MathematicsEducation students in the first semester of academic year 2016/2017. To collect the data, the researcher administered writing testsand collected students' writing drafts. Then, the data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results showed there was a significant difference on both students' writing ability and aspects of writing after the application of this instruction. Then, there was also a difference on their prediction of two texts that it was easier for the students to predict the continuation of the story in Narrative Text rather than in Anecdote one.Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui apakah ada perbedaan dari kemampuan menulis mahasiswa secara umum dan aspek-aspek menulis mereka secara khusus dan untuk menelusuri apakah ada perbedaan dari prediksi mahasiswa terhadap Teks Narasi dan Anekdot sebagai bagian dari Instruksi Input-Output Tertulis Terpahami yang Interaktif. Penelitian ini melibatkan 36 mahasiswa Pendidikan Matematika pada tahun ajaran 2016/2017. Untuk mengumpulkan data, penelitian mengadakan tes menulis dan mengumpulkan draft-draft tulisan mereka. Data-data tersebut kemudian dianalisa secara kuantitatif dan kualitatif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ada perbedaan dari kemampuan menulis mahasiswa secara umum dan aspek-aspek menulis mereka secara khusus setelah penerapan instruksi ini. Selain itu, terdapat perbedaan prediksi yang dibuat terhadap dua tekster sebut dengan lebih mudahnya mahasiswa untuk memprediksi kelanjutan cerita pada Teks Narasi dibandingkan Teks Anekdot.
GesturePod: Gesture-based Interaction Cane for People with Visual Impairments

People using white canes for navigation face challenges concurrently accessing other devices, e.g., smartphones. Building on recent research on abandonment of specialized devices, we explore a new touch free mode of interaction, wherein a person with visual impairment performs gestures on their existing white cane to trigger tasks on their smartphone. We present an easy-to-integrate GesturePod, that clips on to any white cane and enables the detection of gestures performed with the cane. GesturePod, thereby, helps manage a smartphone without touch, or removing the phone from a pocket or bag. In this paper, we present design decisions and challenges in building the pod. We propose a novel, efficient machine learning pipeline to train and deploy the model. Our in-lab study shows that GesturePod achieves >92% gesturerecognition accuracy and can significantly reduce the time taken for common smartphone tasks. Our in-wild study suggests that GesturePod is a promising interaction tool for smartphone, especially in constrained outdoor scenarios.
Information Hiding using Chaotic-Address Steganography

In this study, two techniques are introduced for imagesteganography in the spatial domain. These systems employ chaos theory to trackthe addresses of shuffled bits in steganography. The first system is based onthe well-known LSB technique, while the second system is based on a recentapproach that searches for the identical bits between the secret message andthe cover image. A modified logistic map is employed in the chaotic map togenerate integer chaotic series to extract the shuffled addresses bits. PeakSignal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), histogram analysis andcorrelative analysis are used for testing and evaluating the new levels ofsecurity for the proposed techniques. The results show that the proposedmethods outperform existing systems.
Memristor-Based Hybrid Fault Tolerant Structure With Concurrent Reconfigurability

Fault tolerance is one of the main issues of electronic devices especially for controlling and monitoring of the operations in extreme environments. In this letter, a new memristor-based hybrid approach has been proposed, which combines attractive features of the both static and dynamic methods to introduce a new concurrent reconfigurable structure. The simulation results show that the proposed structure tolerates transient and permanent faults during the run-time with minimum delay, power consumption, and area overhead in comparison to the related works. The proposed work also reaches to minimum silicon protection factor with zero pause time during fault recovery phase.
Análise comparativa entre os métodos decomposição em valores singulares e análise de componentes principais envolvendo matrizes esparsas de grande porte

As tecnicas Decomposicao em Valores Singulares e Analise de Componentes Principais sao oriundas de areas diferentes e possuem objetivos distintos. Apesar disso, sao comumente confundidas. Mais ainda, salvo em trabalhos mais teoricos, poucos estudos sabem quando preterir o uso de uma tecnica frente a outra. Perguntas tais como: a escolha nao elaborada entre as tecnicas pode degradar a qualidade de uma tarefa? e quando utilizar cada uma delas? sao negligenciadas na literatura. Alem disso, a manipulacao e analise eficientes de grandes volumes de dados e hoje um desafio computacional devido a alta dimensionalidade e esparsidade dos dados, o que torna relevante utilizar tecnicas que beneficiem tanto o desempenho quanto a qualidade das analises. No entanto, os trabalhos atuais nao comparam o uso das tecnicas, principalmente, em matrizes esparsas de alta ordem. Assim, nosso trabalho consiste em comparar e verificar diferencas entre as duas tecnicas sobre a tarefa de classificacao de dados.
New Trends in U.S. Pensions

*Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Insurance and Risk Management, the Executive Director of the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Support for this research was provided by the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor; able research assistance was provided by Erica Dykes. Useful comments were provided by Daniel Beller, Phyllis Fernandez, David McCarthy, and Jack Vanderhei, though opinions and conclusions are solely those of the author.
Uso temprano de antibióticos en la infancia y obesidad pediátrica: revisión sistemática de la literatura

Introducción: la prevalencia de obesidad en el mundo es creciente y específicamente la obesidad en niños se ha convertido en un problema de salud pública que preocupa a varios países. La evidencia ha señalado al uso de antibióticos en la infancia como un factor relacionado con la presencia de obesidad infantil.Objetivo: Analizar sistemáticamente la evidencia reciente acerca de la relación entre el uso temprano de antibióticos en la infancia y la presencia de obesidad infantil. Métodos: Se realizó una búsqueda bibliográfica en las bases de Pubmed, Ovid, EBSCO, Lilacs, JAMA pediatrics de estudios observacionales en los últimos diez años que abordaran la relación entre el uso de antibióticos antes de los 24 meses de edad y la obesidad infantil.Resultados: Luego de realizar el tamizaje de los artículos, se seleccionaron 9 para la síntesis cualitativa. Con dos excepciones, los estudios analizados muestran una relación estadísticamente significativa entre el uso temprano de antibióticos y la obesidad o sobrepeso infantil, medido como peso para la edad o mediante el índice de masa corporal y aún con el ajuste por las potenciales variables de confusión, esta asociación permanece siendo estadísticamente significativa, debido a algunos de los diseños epidemiológicos, no se puede verificar la relación de antecedencia temporal de la exposición.
Evaluation of the Occlusive Arterial Disease and Diabetic Angiopathy Treatment Effects by Hyperbaric Oxygenation

Introduction: One of the most severe complications of atherosclerosis is arterial occlusive disease (AOD) and with diabetic angiopathy (DA), is a common chronic problem in clinical practice worldwide. Hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy is a therapeutic modality for solving all forms of hypoxia. Aim: To compare the treatment with HBO therapy in patients with AOD and DA ischemic symptomatology with standard treatment i.e. vasodilators, antibiotics, antiplatelets and statins, and to demonstrate the benefit of the therapeutic modality itself. Methods: We conducted a clinical prospective study and included a total of 80 patients, divided into two groups: 40 patients with the arterial occlusive disease and lower-extremity wounds, with sub-group (n=20) treated with HBO therapy on the top of the standard therapy and 40 patients with diabetic angiopathy and diabetic lower-extremity wounds, with sub-group (n=20) treated with HBO therapy on top of the standard therapy. Results: The efficacy of therapy in patients treated with HBO therapy on the top of standard therapy was significantly higher than in the group of HBO non-treated patients. There was a significant improvement in 9 patients treated with HBO therapy, while in HBO non-treated patients the significant improvement effect was observed only in one patient. Conclusion: HBO therapy is an effective therapeutic component in the healing of diabetic lower-extremity wounds in the patients with AOD and DA. In our patients HBO therapy on the top of standard therapeutic protocol has an effect of reducing the number of lower-limb amputations in patients with AOD and DA. These results support clinical use of HBO therapy for diabetic lower-extremity wound healing.
Offshoring and Skill-Biased Technical Change in the Context of US Protectionism

We discuss the effects of offshoring on the labor market in a matching model with endogenous adjustment of educational skills. We carry out a comparative statics analysis and show that offshoring leads to a restructuring of the economy through skill-biased technical change (SBTC) where overall welfare is improved. In a policy exercise we show that, if offshoring were to be opposed by a protectionist agenda, labor market flexibility can bring about the same welfare gain. In addition, we offer an empirical analysis aimed at verifying the correlation be- tween offshoring and SBTC in US manufacturing industries in recent years. Our results show that different offshoring strategies affect SBTC differently. In particular, the evidence suggests that while high-skill offshoring strategies open the skill gap, low-skill offshoring strategies tend to work in the opposite direction.