Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How do African Farm Households Adapt to Climate Change? A Structural Analysis from Malawi

Using three waves of national representative household level panel data from Malawi, we examine two forms of adaptation to climate change: 1) adopting improved maize varieties and 2) adjusting input quantities and income sources. Our results indicate that climate change induces both forms of adaptation, though only the second appears relevant in determining climate change impacts on net revenue. Adverse trends in climate variables (increased temperature and rainfall variability, and reduced growing season rainfall) increase farmers’ reliance on income from subsistence maize production. Assets enhance a household’s capacity for adaptation to climate change by reducing reliance on maize-income.
Dynamic Human Activity Recognition Based on Improved FNN Model

In this paper, we propose an automatic system that recognizes dynamic human gestures activity, including Arabic numbers from 0 to 9. We assume the gesture trajectory is almost in a plane that called principal gesture plane, then the Least Squares Method is used to estimate the plane and project the 3 D trajectory model onto the principal. An improved FNN model combined with HMM is proposed for dynamic gesture recognition, which combines ability of HMM model for temporal data modeling with that of fuzzy neural network. The proposed algorithm shows that satisfactory performance and high recognition rate.
Robust Adaptive Beamforming Based on Worst-Case and Norm Constraint

A novel robust adaptive beamforming based on worst-case and norm constraint (RAB-WC-NC) is presented. The proposed beamforming possesses superior robustness against array steering vector (ASV) error with finite snapshots by using the norm constraint and worst-case performance optimization (WCPO) techniques. Simulation results demonstrate the validity and superiority of the proposed algorithm.
A Study on Improving The Distribution Processes. The Case of Miruna Internaţional Impex Ltd.Romania

Abstract Investing is a category of spending that engages the future most, depends on increasing and improving the productive potential of an enterprise (through expansion and modernization), the emergence of new production capacities. Because it is necessary to allocate large resources for the investment process, they are for a long time and the decision making process involves a lot of uncertainties. A decision on investment projects must be based on a careful analysis of all aspects of the context, the variables involved and their dynamics.
Why do financial services companies pay dividend? Evidence from Qatar Stock Exchange

This study identifies the dividend policy determinants of banks and other financial institutions listed on Qatar Stock Exchange (QSE) for a period from 2009 to 2015 through studying the impact on eight factors on banks’ dividends per share. Three models were adopted to investigate the determinants of the dividend policy and the factors that affect a bank’s decision to pay out dividends. The findings indicate that the previous year’s dividends per share, earnings per share, cash flow per share, firm size and return on average equity are positively related to the current year’s dividends per share, as hypothesized. The study shows that the leverage position, bank’s life cycle and growth opportunities are negatively related to the dividend payment. The study also reveals that banks and financial institutions in Qatar do a bit of “earnings smoothing” when comparing the earnings figures with the cash flow.
Moderating impact of tourism relationship management dimensions on tourism service quality, tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty

Article history: Received October 23,2013 Received in revised format November 25, 2013 Accepted November 29, 2013 Available online November 29 2013 This study attempts to assess the moderating impact of recently introduced tourist relationship management (TRM) framework on service quality perception-tourist satisfaction-destination loyalty link. Tourist relationship management framework draws inspiration from customer relationship management (CRM) model with validated addition of dimensions compatible to tourism dynamics. The study, carried out in Santiniketan, India, confirmed moderating impact of dimensional performance of tourist relationship management on perceived tourism service quality-tourist satisfaction-destination loyalty link.
Modal and strength analysis of coal mine mobile refuge chamber

Structural strength, stiffness, etc. are essential safety performances of mine refuge chamber. In this article, the safety performance of the chamber which is under the impact load was evaluated by the method of numerical analysis. First of all, according to some relative standards, a chamber model was established by applying numerical modeling software. In this way, a method of finite element analysis (FEA) was instituted and we used AUTODUN to simulate the process of transmission of blast waves in the underworkings. On the basis of Fourier transform theory, the spectrum analysis of the blast waves acting on the chamber has been done. In order to obtain the natural frequency, a model analysis of the chamber was made by applying OPTISTRUCT. Then the main frequency and the natural frequency were compared. The result shows that the resonance will not happen so that the safety performance of the chamber meets the demand of engineering safety. The structural strength of the chamber was analyzed by using LS-DYNA, and the result comes out that the pressure throughout the chamber will not cause damage to the chamber. After that, according to the simulation results, we proposed some pieces of advice which will be meaningful for the design and the improvement of the chamber.
Chimerism a natural ability to tolerate kin, evolutionary traits connecting mammalian and protochordates

In the middle of the 20 th century, Owen (1945, 1954) and Billingham et al. (1953) immunological studies suggested that fetal exposure to foreign antigens during pregnancy induce immunologic tolerance in the fetus. Recently, Mold et al. found that a substantial number of maternal cells crosses the placenta to reside in fetal lymph nodes and induces the development of regulatory T cells (Tregs) that suppress fetal anti-maternal immunity. These Tregs cells persist till, at least, early adulthood. This result demonstrates how chimerism induces fetal tolerance to maternal antigens during mammalian pregnancy. Natural chimerism is the coexistence of two or more genomic lineages within the same individual. It is a common phenomenon which can be detected in a wide variety of multi-cellular organisms. In mammals, natural chimerism can be established during pregnancy between the mother and the fetus or between fetuses in a multiple embryos pregnancy. Restriction of natural chimerism mainly to kin is also observed in colonial marine protochordates. In protochordates, like Botryllus schlosseri, natural chimerism can be established through fusion of vasculature, between a parent colony and its progeny or between siblings (adult distinct colonies). The ability to tolerate a partial allogeneic individual and to create a chimeric entity between these colonies is determined by a single, highly polymorphic, fusion/histocompatibility locus (Fu/HC). Colonies that share at least one allele in their Fu/HC locus would fuse upon contact. A pair that does not share any Fu/HC allele would not. In the chimera, cells transmigrate between partners and in some cases, replace the germline and/or the somatic tissues of the host. This genotype replacement is mediated by stem cells (termed somatic/germ cell parasitism). Botryllus colonies propagate asexually through budding, therefore somatic stem cell parasitism in host colonies can induce the development of a partial allogeneic entity (buds) within the host colony. In this way, chimerism in protochordates serves as a state that enables the development of a “virtual embryo” within the host colony. In light of Mold et al., study, which demonstrates a role to chimerism in tolerance induction during pregnancy, studying the immunological mediators for natural acceptance of partial allogeneic allograft in protochordates may reveal the evolutionary precursors to the tolerance state during mammalian pregnancy.
A mode-locked thulium-doped fiber laser based on a nonlinear loop mirror

We have demonstrated an all-fiber mode-locked thulium-doped fiber laser with extremely long pulses, a very narrow spectrum and a high average power. The mode-locker is formed by a nonlinear loop mirror. The laser generates sinus-squared waveform with a repetition period of 82 ns and an average power between 100 and 150 mW. The wavelength is defined by the fiber Bragg grating and is 1956 nm.
Design of a Frequency and Polarization Reconfigurable Patch Antenna With a Stable Gain

This paper presents a frequency and polarization reconfigurable patch antenna with a small gain variation. Eight discrete operating frequency bands can be achieved by properly switching shorting pins, and three polarization states, i.e., left-hand circularly polarization, right-hand circularly polarization, and linearly polarization, can be realized simultaneously by adjusting perturbation segments. A stable gain performance is obtained within a wide reconfigurable frequency range, as well as all the reconfigurable polarization states, by utilizing the loss-character of p-i-n diodes when shorting pins are properly switched ON/OFF for different states. A prototype is designed, fabricated, and measured. The simulated and measured results agree as well. The experimental results show that the proposed antenna exhibits a simple reconfigurable network, a wide switching frequency range, a good element gain, and a small gain variation less than 1.8 dB across all the operating states.
Hydrogels for the Application of Articular Cartilage Tissue Engineering: A Review of Hydrogels

The treatment of articular cartilage damage is a major task in the medical science of orthopedics. Hydrogels possess the ability to form multifunctional cartilage grafts since they possess polymeric swellability upon immersion in an aqueous phase. Polymeric hydrogels are capable of physiological swelling and greasing, and they possess the mechanical behavior required for use as articular cartilage substitutes. The chondrogenic phenotype of these materials may be enhanced by embedding living cells. Artificial hydrogels fabricated from biologically derived and synthesized polymeric materials are also used as tissue-engineering scaffolds; with their controlled degradation profiles, the release of stimulatory growth factors can be achieved. In order to make use of these hydrogels, cartilage implants were formulated in the laboratory to demonstrate the bionic mechanical behaviors of physiological cartilage. This paper discusses developments concerning the use of polymeric hydrogels for substituting injured cartilage tissue and assisting tissue growth. These gels are designed with consideration of their polymeric classification, mechanical strength, manner of biodegradation, limitations of the payload, cellular interaction, amount of cells in the 3D hydrogel, sustained release for the model drug, and the different approaches for incorporation into adjacent organs. This article also summarizes the different advantages, disadvantages, and the future prospects of hydrogels.
International and Development Economics roductivity in the Australian Dairy Industry

Although the Australian dairy industry has performed well it has also faced considerable pressure over the past twenty years. A decline in the terms of trade and major structural change has provided added incentives for the industry to improve productivity. This paper constructs Tornqvist index values to measure and analyse movements in inputs, outputs, total factor productivity (TFP) and the terms of trade for the dairy industry as a whole and for each state over the years 1979 to 1999. Overall, there is clear evidence of a significant increase in the TFP index in the 1990s relative to the 1980s. However, in terms of fitted annual growth rates, there is also evidence of a productivity ‘slow down’ in the 1990s, with the principal exception of New South Wales. Average annual growth in dairy total factor productivity in Australia over the entire twenty-year period is 1.5 per cent, but decreases from 1.8 per cent in the first to 0.9 per cent in the second decade. In Victoria, the largest dairy producer, the growth in TFP in the second decade of the study is virtually zero, with poor weather conditions in the second half of the decade partly to blame. Much of the impressive growth in dairy output in the 1990s can thus be simply attributed to a growth in inputs. Index values for the terms of trade, the share of input costs in total costs and potential drives of productivity change are also examined. Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY http://apseg.anu.edu.au International and Development Economics Working Paper 03-8 Productivity in the Australian Dairy Industry Tom Kompas National Centre for Development Studies Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government Australian National University Canberra, ACT tom.kompas@anu.edu.au Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics Canberra, ACT tom.kompas@abare.gov. au
Edinburgh Research Explorer Measuring biomass changes due to woody encroachment and deforestation/degradation in a forest-savanna boundary region of central Africa using multi-temporal L-band radar backscatter

Satellite L-band synthetic aperture radar backscatter data from 1996 and 2007 (from JERS-1 and ALOS PALSAR respectively), were used with field data collected in 2007 and a back-calibration method to produce biomass maps of a 15 000 km 2 forest-savanna ecotone region of central Cameroon. The relationship between the radar backscatter and aboveground biomass (AGB) was strong ( r 2 = 0.84 for ALOS HV to biomass plots, r 2 = 0.95 relating ALOS-derived biomass for 40 suspected unchanged regions to JERS-1 HH). The root mean square error (RMSE) associated with AGB estimation varied from ~25% for AGB < 100 Mg ha -1 to ~40% for AGB > 100 Mg ha - 1 for the ALOS HV data. Change detection showed a significant loss of AGB over high biomass forests, due to suspected deforestation and degradation, and significant gains along the forest-savanna boundary, particularly in areas of low population density. Analysis of the errors involved showed that radar data can detect changes in broad AGB class in forest-savanna transition areas with an accuracy >95%. However, quantitative assessment of changes in AGB in Mg ha -1 at a pixel level will require radar images from sensors with similar characteristics collecting data from the same season over multiple years.
Heterogeneous beliefs in a sticky-price foreign exchange model

This thesis consists of four papers, of which paper 1 and 4 are co-written with Mikael Bask. Paper [1] implements chartists trading in a sticky-price monetary model for determining the exchange rate. It is demonstrated that chartists cause the exchange rate to "overshoot the overshooting equilibrium" of a sticky-price monetary model. Chartists base their trading on a short-long moving average. The importance of technical trading depends inversely on the time horizon in currency trade. The exchange rate's perfect foresight path near long-run equilibrium is derived and it is demonstrated that the shorter the time horizon, the greater the exchange rate overshooting. The aim of Paper [2] is to see how the dynamics of the basic target zone model changes when chartists and fundamentalists are introduced. Chartists use technical trading and the relative importance of technical and fundamental analyses depend on the time horizon in currency trade. The model also includes realignment expectations, which increase with the weight of chartists. The introduction of chartists may significantly reduce and reverse, the so-called "honeymoon effect" of a fully credible target zone. Further, chartists may cause the correlation between the exchange rate and the instantaneous interest rate differential to become either positive or negative. Using a chartist-fundamentalist set-up, Paper [3] derives the effects on the current exchange rate of central bank intervention. Fundamentalists have rational expectations and chartists use so called support and resistance levels in their trading. This technique results in chartists having both bandwagon expectations and regressive expectations. Chartists may enhance or suppress the effect of intervention depending on their expectations. The results indicate that a chartist channel exists. The aim of Paper [4] is threefold; (i) to investigate if there is a unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE) in a new Keynesian macroeconomic model augmented with technical trading, (ii), to investigate if the unique REE is adaptively learnable and, (iii), to investigate if this unique and adaptively learnable REE is desirable in an inflation rate targeting regime. The monetary authority is using a Taylor rule when setting the interest rate. A main conclusion is that a robust Taylor rule implies that the monetary authority should increase (decrease) the interest rate when the CPI inflation rate increases (decreases) and when the currency gets stronger (weaker).
SOME RECENT RESULTS IN RARE EVENT ESTIMATION

This article presents several state-of-the-art Monte Carlo methods for simulating and estimating rare events. A rare event occurs with a very small probability, but its occurrence is important enough to justify an accurate study. Rare event simulation calls for specific techniques to speed up standard Monte Carlo sampling, which requires unacceptably large sample sizes to observe the event a sucient number of times. Among these variance reduction methods, the most prominent ones are Importance Sampling (IS) and Multilevel Splitting, also known as Subset Simulation. This paper oers some recent results on both aspects, motivated by theoretical issues as well as by applied problems. Resume. Cet article propose un etat de l'art de plusieurs methodes Monte Carlo pour l'estimation d'evenements rares. Un evenement rare est par definition un evenement de probabilite tres faible, mais d'importance pratique cruciale, ce qui justifie une etude precise. La methode Monte Carlo classique s'averant prohibitivement couteuse, il importe d'appliquer des techniques specifiques pour leur estima- tion. Celles-ci se divisent en deux grandes categories : echantillonnage preferentiel d'un cote, methodes multi-niveaux de l'autre. Nous presentons ici quelques resultats recents dans ces domaines, motives par des considerations tant pratiques que theoriques.
Discriminate Cross-modal Quantization for Efficient Retrieval

Efficient cross-modal retrieval involves searching similar items across different modalities, e.g., using an image(text) to search for texts(images). To speed up cross-modal retrieval, hashing-based methods threshold continuous embeddings into binary codes, inducing substantial loss of accuracy retrieval. To further improve retrieval performance, several quantization-based methods quantize embeddings into real-valued codewords to maximumlly preserve inter-modal and intra-modal similarity relation, while the discrimination between dissimilar data is ignored. To address these challenges, we propose, for the first time, a novel discriminate cross-modal quantization(DCMQ) which nonlinearly maps different modalities into a common space where ir-relevant data points are semantically separable: the points belonging to a class lie in a cluster that is not overlapped with other clusters corresponding to other classes. An effective optimization algorithm is developed for the proposed method to jointly learn the modality-specific mapping functions, the sharing codebooks, the unified binary codes and a linear classifier. Experimental comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms over three benchmark datasets demonstrates that DCMQ achieves significant improvement in search accuracy.
An investigation of Organizational Happiness Impact on the Working Life Quality ;(Case Study: Isfahan University's Staff)

Nowadays, the lack of happiness in organizational environments is one of the main problems for these organizations. In these organizations, organizational structures and management strategies should be looking for some tools and methods to perform the duties of the employee better and increase the productivity through increasing monetary satisfaction, vital needs and individually staff development in their organizations. In this regard one of the newest and most efficient techniques is the creation of a happy organization with relaxation and satisfaction for staff by organizational management. The present study has been conducted to examine the effects of organizational happiness on the working life quality among Isfahan university staff and a random sample of 200 employees was selected and data was collected through questionnaires. The software used for data analysis and hypothesis testing were SPSS 18 and Amos 20. The results indicate that among university employees the quality of work life is affected by organizational happiness.
Implementation of Obstacle Detection and Avoidance Methodology for Low Cost Autonomous Vehicle

The objective of this paper is to describe a low-cost autonomous robotic car which can be run without any remote control or under any human’s guidance. Robot’s main advantage is that it can replace human force in high risk and dangerous job avoiding the risk of human life. The robotic car must be designed in small size, easily operable and of course of low-cost. Along with the obstacle detection and avoidance, this can also be a source of entertainment of people of all the age groups. It's further implication in different types of system can make it more useful. For instance, this small part can be added to the navigation system which can guide partially visually impaired persons, it can be added in an automatic wheelchair which can be used by physically handicapped persons, and it can be used for industrial purposes also where robots are used to pick and place some objects in defined places etc.
Energy Effectiveness of Direct UV and UV/H2O2 Treatment of Estrogenic Chemicals in Biologically Treated Sewage

Continuous exposure of aquatic life to estrogenic chemicals via wastewater treatment plant effluents has in recent years received considerable attention due to the high sensitivity of oviparous animals to disturbances of estrogen-controlled physiology. The removal efficiency by direct UV and the UV/H2O2 treatment was investigated in biologically treated sewage for most of the estrogenic compounds reported in wastewater. The investigated compounds included parabens, industrial phenols, sunscreen chemicals, and steroid estrogens. Treatment experiments were performed in a flow through setup. The effect of different concentrations of H2O2 and different UV doses was investigated for all compounds in an effluent from a biological wastewater treatment plant. Removal effectiveness increased with H2O2 concentration until 60 mg/L. The treatment effectiveness was reported as the electrical energy consumed per unit volume of water treated required for 90% removal of the investigated compound. It was found that the removal of all the compounds was dependent on the UV dose for both treatment methods. The required energy for 90% removal of the compounds was between 28 kWh/m3 (butylparaben) and 1.2 kWh/m3 (estrone) for the UV treatment. In comparison, the UV/H2O2 treatment required between 8.7 kWh/m3 for bisphenol A and benzophenone-7 and 1.8 kWh/m3 for ethinylestradiol.