Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of infrastructure efficiency in economic development—The case of underused highways in Europe

In this paper, we establish a two-way causality between the phenomenon of infrastructure which is underused (the so-called “white elephant case”) and the aggregate productivity level (TFP) of the economy. On the one hand, the fact that a transport infrastructure is not used as much as it could be is itself a cause of low TFP because it represents low productivity for an important item of social capital. On the other hand, low aggregate productivity makes firms’ strategies founded on large scale of production and exports riskier, given the possibility that the political decision to build the required transport infrastructure may never be taken.
What happens when adaptive video streaming players compete with Long-Lived TCP flows?

---------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT ----------------------------------------------------------- Competition among adaptive video streaming players severely diminishes user-QoE. When players compete at a bottleneck link many do not obtain adequate resources. This imbalance eventually causes ill effects such as screen flickering and video stalling. This scenario worsens when Long-lived TCP flows compete with the video flows. It is a known fact that adaptive video players perform poorly in the presence of Long-lived TCP flows. This work evaluates current heuristic adaptive video players at a bottleneck link in the presence of Long-lived TCP flows. Experimental setup includes the TAPAS player and emulated network conditions. The results show ELASTIC outperforms PANDA, FESTIVE and the Conventional players.
Relationship of Corporate Entrepreneurship with Different Dimensions of Organizational Intelligence

This study is conducted with the aim to explore the relationship between the organizational intelligence and its dimensions (strategic vision, common fate, desire for change, employees' morale, employees' unity and agreement, knowledge application and performance pressure) with the corporate entrepreneurship of Kerman Motor Company. Analysis of data, obtained from the implementation of questionnaires, was done through the software SPSS in two descriptive (frequency, frequency percentage, mean, standard deviation) and inferential (Pearson correlation coefficient, Friedman rank test and Shapiro-Wilk test) sectors. Research results show that there is a significant relationship between the organizational intelligence and its dimensions with the corporate entrepreneurship. Moreover, the dimensions of organizational intelligence in Kerman Motor Company were ranked by Friedman rank test and it was found that the highest rank was related to the knowledge application.
A Leaky-Wave Antenna With Controlled Radiation Using a Bianisotropic Huygens’ Metasurface

In this paper, a novel concept of a leaky-wave antenna is proposed, based on the use of Huygens’ metasurfaces. It consists of a parallel-plate waveguide in which the top plate is replaced by a bianisotropic metasurface of the omega type. It is shown that there is an exact solution to transform the guided mode into a leaky mode with arbitrary control of the constant leakage factor and the pointing direction. Although the solution turns out to be periodic, only one Floquet mode is excited and radiates, even for electrically long periods. Thanks to the intrinsic spurious Floquet mode suppression, broadside radiation can be achieved without any degradation. Simulations with idealized reactance sheets verify the concept. Moreover, physical structures compatible with PCB fabrication have been proposed and designed, considering aspects such as the effect of losses. Finally, experimental results of two prototypes are presented and discussed.
Characterization and Detection of Yellow Vein Disease of Okra ( Abelmoschus esculentus (L.) Moench) in Sri Lanka

Begamoviruses transmitted by whitefly (Bemisia tabaci Genn, Family Aleyrodidae) cause severe damage to crop plants showing varying symptoms in different crop species. Okra Yellow Vein Mosaic Virus (OYVMV) is one of the most devastating diseases reported in okra cultivation worldwide. In this study, OYVMV disease severity and incidence of three recommended okra varieties were evaluated in field conditions at three different locations; Gannoruwa, Mahailuppalama and Angunakolapalasse. Similar disease symptoms were observed in Mahailuppallama and Angunakolapalasse. In Gannoruwa late infection caused lesser disease incidence and severity. Statistical analysis showed significant difference in severity and incidence of OYVMV among varieties as well as locations. MI 7 and MI 5 showed significantly high disease severity than Haritha while location Mahailluppallama showed significantly high disease severity followed by Angunakolapalasse. Diseased samples collected from these three locations and two additional locations i.e. Kilinochchi and Vauniya were subjected to PCR amplification with different begamovirus specific primers to identify the cross infection with other begamovirus diseases. All symptomatic samples collected from different locations showed positive results for OYVMV specific primer while none of the diseased samples showed positive results for Chili leaf curl virus, Tomato leaf curl virus, Okra leaf curl virus and Okra leaf curl crinkle virus disease specific primers. This study revealed that there is location and variety effect on OYVMV disease incidence and in these locations tested okra varieties were not cross infected with other tested viruses. Sequence analysis has to be done to identify genetic diversity of okra YVMV in different locations.
Dielectric preconditioner in density functional theory self-consistent field calculations

Many interesting properties of matter are governed by its electronic structure. To gain theoretical knowledge of the behavior of electrons, one must solve the Schrödinger equation. However, as the number of the electrons grows, this task becomes increasingly difficult. Density functional theory provides means to simplify the calculations. The theory relies on the Kohn–Sham equations which must be solved using iterative methods. To ensure the convergence of the iteration, mixing and preconditioning techniques often need to be employed. In this thesis, a new way of preconditioning is implemented as a part of an existing electronic structure simulation code package, the Fritz Haber Institute “ab initio molecular simulations”. The preconditioner uses the static dielectric function of the system to speed up convergence. This implementation is tested against preexisting methods in a variety of test systems. In simple systems that contain only a few atoms the dielectric preconditioner managed to slightly decrease the amount of iterations required for the calculation to converge compared to other tested methods. However, the current implementation of the dielectric preconditioner was discovered not to improve convergence in periodic systems. As an additional setback, the increased computational complexity of calculating the dielectric function outweighs the time saved by reducing the number of iterations. Nevertheless, the preconditioner did perform well in a metallic system, which are known to be challenging to calculate.
Arabic Text Categorization Using Logistic Regression

Several Text Categorization (TC) techniques and algorithms have been investigated in the limited research literature of Arabic TC. In this research, Logistic Regression (LR) is investigated in Arabic TC. To the best of our knowledge, LR was never used for Arabic TC before. Experiments are conducted on Aljazeera Arabic News (Alj-News) dataset. Arabic text-preprocessing takes place on this dataset to handle the special nature of Arabic text. Experimental results of this research prove that the LR classifier is a competitive Arabic TC algorithm to the state of the art ones in this field; it has recorded a precision of 96.5% on one category and above 90% for 3 categories out of the five categories of Alj-News dataset. Regarding the overall performance, LR has recorded a macroaverage precision of 87%, recall of 86.33% and F- measure of 86.5%.
Gender streaming in Vietnam EAST ASIA AND PACIFIC GENDER INNOVATION LAB

Differences in earnings between male and female workers persist in both developed and developing countries despite a narrowing of gender gaps in educational attainment over the last half-century. We examine the gender wage gap in Vietnam and show that a non-trivial part of the gap is associated with occupational sorting. We consider three explanations for why occupational sorting emerges. First, we explore whether occupational sorting is driven by gender differences in preferences for non-monetary characteristics of the jobs. We find that there are indeed differences between the genders in preferences for having a formal contract, insurance, paid leave and shorter hours, which may induce women to forego monetary compensation for these characteristics. Second, we check if occupational sorting among the adult labor force is driven by social norms about gender roles learned and internalized at an early age. To do so we check for evidence of sorting in the aspirations of 12-year-old children. Specifically, we simulate what the gender wage gap would be if boys and girls pursued the occupations they aspire to at 12 and the distribution of salaries remained unchanged. We do not find support for the hypothesis that gender norms drive occupational sorting by inducing aspirational sorting at an early age. Finally, for women with higher education, we check if occupational sorting occurs during the school to work transition. Specifically, we check whether women are less likely to find jobs within their field of study upon graduation. We do not find evidence to support this last hypothesis. Overall, our findings suggest that in Vietnam gender specific preferences for non-monetary job characteristics play a key role in emergence of occupational sorting. These preferences may be driven by unequal distribution of childcare and household responsibilities across genders. Thus, our results draw attention to the importance of fostering environments where women and men can more easily balance household and market roles, and shifting social norms about the distribution of childcare and household burdens.
Metric Learning Tutorial

Most popular machine learning algorithms like k-nearest neighbour, k-means, SVM uses a metric to identify the distance(or similarity) between data instances. It is clear that performances of these algorithm heavily depends on the metric being used. In absence of prior knowledge about data we can only use general purpose metrics like Euclidean distance, Cosine similarity or Manhattan distance etc, but these metric often fail to capture the correct behaviour of data which directly affects the performance of the learning algorithm. Solution to this problem is to tune the metric according to the data and the problem, manually deriving the metric for high dimensional data which is often difficult to even visualize is not only tedious but is extremely difficult. Which leads to put effort on \textit{metric learning} which satisfies the data geometry.Goal of metric learning algorithm is to learn a metric which assigns small distance to similar points and relatively large distance to dissimilar points.
New Approaches for Multi Source Data Sediment Characterisation, Thickness Assessment and Clean Up Strategies

The present article explain how potentially contaminated sediment thickness in Augusta harbour was estimated by using a multisource dataset characterized by a variable accuracy. Inequalities constrains on the sediment thickness are extracted from the sediment sampling stations and seismic profiles in which the hard irregular sub-bottom was out of detection range (soft data). It utilized the kriging-withinequalities method that belongs to the data transformation group. The method considers the inequalities constraints as data themselves and, after a transformation, their use together with the exact hard data to estimate the thickness of the sediment layer. The results show the usefulness of an approach that permitted to extract the maximum information from multisource data, collected for different purposes, in order to assess the 3D spatial domain of recent contaminated sediment and reduce the cost of management.
Spectroscopy of Blue Supergiants in the Spiral Galaxy NGC 300

We have obtained VLT low-resolution (~5 Å) multiobject spectroscopy in the 4000-5000 Å spectral range of about 70 blue supergiant candidates in the Sculptor Group spiral galaxy NGC 300, selected from previous wide-field photometry. Of the 62 spectroscopically confirmed blue supergiants, with spectral types ranging from late O to F, 57 have types between early B and mid-A. We present a detailed spectral catalog containing identification, magnitudes, colors, and spectral types. We employ synthetic spectra calculated from blue supergiant model atmospheres for different metallicities to determine metal abundances for two A0 supergiants of the sample. In agreement with the expectations, the star closer to the galactic center is found to be more metal-rich than the object at a larger galactocentric distance. We will employ this technique on the whole supergiant sample to determine the stellar abundance gradient in the disk of NGC 300, together with the internal reddening from a comparison of the observed versus synthetic colors. This will allow, among other things, an accurate calibration of the effect of metallicity on the Cepheid period-luminosity relation. Using the Balmer Hβ line profile, we have estimated the mass-loss rate for one of the brightest A2 supergiants in the sample. Under additional reasonable assumptions, we determined the wind momentum of the star and compared it with the value expected from the empirical wind momentum-luminosity relationship (WLR) for A-type supergiants of Kudritzki et al. Good agreement is obtained. We will derive mass-loss rates and wind momenta for all stars in our sample from the Hα line profiles in forthcoming work, and we will then thoroughly test the usefulness of the WLR for distance measurement out to about 15 Mpc.
Tropical cyclogenesis sensitivity to environmental parameters in radiative–convective equilibrium

In this study, the relationship between the likelihood of tropical cyclogenesis and external environmental forcings is explored in the simplest idealized modelling framework possible: radiative‐convective equilibrium on a doubly periodic f‐plane. In such an environment, control of the equilibrium environmental sounding is reduced to three parameters: the sea‐surface temperature, the Coriolis parameter, and the imposed background surface wind speed. Cloud‐resolving mesoscale model simulations are used to generate environments of radiative‐convective equilibrium determined by these three factors. The favourability of these environments for tropical cyclogenesis is measured in three ways: in terms of the maximum potential intensity (MPI) of the sounding, based on the thermodynamic theory of Emanuel; in terms of the ‘genesis potential’ determined by an empirical genesis parameter; and in terms of the propensity of weak initial vortices in these environments to form into tropical cyclones.
Analysis of runtime reconfiguration systems

Analysis of Runtime Re-Configuration Systems by Utthaman Thirunavukkarasu Dr. Henry Selvaraj, Examination Committee Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Nevada, Las Vegas In recent years Programmable Logic Devices (PLD) and in particular Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have seen a tremendous increase in sales and applications in the area of embedded systems. The main advantage of FPGAs is the flexibility that they offer a designer in reconfiguring the hardware. The flexibility achieved through re-configuration of FPGAs usually incurs an overhead of extra execution time, data memory and also power dissipation. FPGAs provide an ideal template for run-time reconfigurable (RTR) designs. Only recently have RTR enabling design tools that bypass the traditional synthesis and bitstream generation process for FPGAs become available, JBits is one of them. With run-time reconfiguration of FPGAs, we can perform partial reconfiguration, which allows reconfiguration o f a part of an FPGA while the other part is executing some functional computation. The partial reconfiguration of a function can be performed earlier than the time when the function is really needed. Such configuration pre-fetch can hide the reconfiguration overhead more effectively.
Perspectives of Islet Cell Transplantation as a Therapeutic Approach for Diabetes Mellitus

Diabetes mellitus, the metabolic disorder is rapidly on the rise, becoming one of the main threats to human health and imposing large socio-economic burden on the society in the 21st century (Dall et al.; 2010). International Diabetes Federation in 2011 estimated that over 300 million people around the world have diabetes and is expected to rise to 500 million within next 20 years. The global prevalence of diabetes is shifting significantly from the developed countries to the developing countries. Current therapy for diabetes involves oral antidiabetic drugs and insulin administration; these approaches do not mimic the pulsatile insulin secretory patterns of native β islets for the regulation of glucose in real-time nor provide tight control of blood glucose to avoid late complications of the disease. Whole pancreas transplantation holds promise towards a cure for diabetes, but this procedure requires major surgery and lifelong immunosuppression to prevent graft rejection. Transplantation of islet cells isolated from a donor pancreas has been shown to control glucose levels successfully. Being less invasive, it is a better alternative to pancreas transplantation yet scarcity of donors, maintenance of islet functions such as cell growth and survival in vitro, and concern over the adverse effect of life long immunosuppressants used to prevent graft rejection precludes the benefits of islet transplantation from becoming universally acceptable. One approach to overcome these obstacles of immune rejection is islet encapsulation (Kizilel et al., 2005; Mikos et al; 1994) that uses an immuno-protective biomaterial to create a permselective membrane around a group of islet cells. Transplanted islet cells are separated from the immunological system of host by means of an artificial selectively permeable membrane which allows passage of metabolites and nutrients, while excluding based on size, the larger proteins and cells of the immune system. Thus, encapsulation is designed to limit, and ideally eliminate, an immunological response to the non-host islet cells. Isolation of the islet cells from the human immune system may also make xeno-transplants such as porcine islets, stem cells derived insulin producing cells possible, eliminating the supply problem that exists and the usage of immune suppressive drugs. Current research is directed towards exploration of alternative sources of pancreatic islet cells. Pancreatic βcell lines, embryonic stem cells (ESC), adult progenitor cells (APC), and regenerating native islet cells, generation of β cells by therapeutic cloning and
Avian Influenza in Wild Birds from South America: Review, Implications and Perspectives

Avian influenza viruses (AIVs) have been recorded in a broad variety of hosts, including humans, terrestrial and marine mammals, and domestic and wild birds. Wild aquatic birds are recognized as the chief natural reservoirs of AIV, and their migratory flyways can serve as routes for the dispersion of the virus across countries and continents. Although AIV is one of the most studied pathogens in the world, studies on the ecology and epidemiology of this virus in South America are few and fragmented. In this review, we examine the current state of the art on the epidemiology of AIV in wild birds in South America. Current evidence corroborates that many of the broad epidemiological patterns that have been documented in other continents, such as the role played by Anseriformes and Charadriiformes in the maintenance and spread of AIV, are also true in South America. On the other hand, the fact that AIV prevalence in South American studies appears to be remarkably lower than that observed in other continents, along with the presence of endemic taxa of birds that may be highly susceptible to AIV, indicates that South America may have distinct characteristics that modulate the epidemiology of AIV in unique ways. However, our knowledge on the occurrence of AIV in South America is still limited and there are important gaps in the species and geographic distribution of the sampling effort.
Evidence of predation on the vertebra of a hadrosaurid dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) of Coahuila, Mexico

In sediments of the Aguja Formation (Late Cretaceous: Campanian) at La Salada in northern part of the state of Coahuila, Mexico, numerous fossils of vertebrates have been discovered including Hadrosauridae. One hadrosaur vertebra provides evidence of predation probably by a giant alligator Deinosuchus riograndensis.
Bubbling phenomena for fourth-order four-dimensional PDEs with exponential growth

We are concerned in this paper with the bubbling phenomenon for nonlinear fourth-order four-dimensional PDE's. The operators in the equations are perturbations of the bi-Laplacian. The nonlinearity is of exponential growth. Such equations arise naturally in statistical physics and geometry. As a consequence of our theorem we get a priori bounds for solutions of our equations.
IN SITU MONITORING OF A CONTROLLED RELEASE OF FERTILIZERS IN LETTUCE CROP

Agriculture has sought ways to increase food production to meet global demands, intensifying dependence on natural resources. An alternative for intensive production has relied on the use of “smart” fertilizers that release nutrients in a controlled manner. Biodegradable polymers containing fertilizers has presented economic and environmental advantages when applied to the soil, as they release water and nutrients gradually to the environment without leaving residues. The objective of this study was to monitor the behavior of chitosan-clay hybrid microspheres, used as potassium nitrate soil ferti-releaser in lettuce cultivation. The experiment consisted of two treatments: (i) application of ferti-releasing chitosan-clay microspheres and (ii) use of conventional fertilization. Both treatments were monitored with TDR probes to measure electrical conductivity and soil moisture. The results indicate that both moisture and electrical conductivity are higher in soils treated with the ferti-releasing material. In addition, there was a gradual and homogenous release if compared to the conventional fertilization. The statistical analysis showed that the microspheres were efficient mainly for the controlled nitrogen release.