Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Luxury Indicate Sustainability? An Analysis of the Maldives

The environment of small tourism islands, as climate and coastal resources, make them favourable locations for luxury resorts. However, tourism can cause a threat to these islands’ local environment. Thus, the Maldives government has developed regulations to ensure a balance between resource protection and use. This study examines, from the conceptual framework of sustainable tourism, whether luxury indicates sustainability in the Maldives, that is, if there is a link between luxury and sustainability. To perform this analysis we have studied 91 deluxe and non-deluxe resorts in the Maldives using content analysis methodology. Then we have applied a Principal Components Analysis to determine whether the resorts can be grouped according to their tourist attractions and sustainable activities. Results show that we can not affirm that luxury implies sustainability, but we might conclude that both are possible.
Modification of the proportion of extractable and bound condensed tannins in birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and sainfoin (Onobrychis viicifolia) during wilting, ensiling and pelleting processes

Condensed tannins (CT) in legume forages vary not only in concentration and structure, but also in the portion of soluble and proteinand fibre-bound fractions. This study aimed to assess the changes in the total CT level as well as relative abundance of the three CT fractions from fresh to wilted, ensiled or pelleted legumes like in birds foot trefoil (two cultivars) and in sainfoin (one cultivar). Each legume underwent three consecutive harvests, of which the first two were wilted. Additionally, wilted legumes were either ensiled (first harvest) or transformed into dehydrated pellets (second harvest). For each harvest, total CT and the percentage of soluble, proteinand fibre-bound CT differed (P < 0.01) among plants. The total CT content was similar after wilting but was lower (P < 0.05) after ensiling. After wilting, ensiling and pelleting the portion of soluble CT was lower in favour of protein-bound CT portion. However, time of harvest affected (P < 0.05) total CT and the percentage of soluble and protein-bound CT. Thus, measuring the bound-fraction should not be ignored in the determination of CT content since this fraction, together with the soluble fraction, might protect protein from ruminal degradation.
A possible interpretation of the Seyfert-like component in 3C 273 X-ray spectrum

Context. Recent studies of the X-ray spectrum of the quasar 3C 273, analyzing both BeppoSAX data and XMM-Newton data, have shown that, depending on the state of the source, Seyfert-like spectral features, including a significant soft excess, can be detected superimposed on the generally overwhelming beamed non-thermal emission (“jet” component). Aims. In order to explain the Seyfert-like component and the soft excess suggested by the X-ray spectrum analysis, we apply to 3C 273 a recently developed model for non-thermal emission of X-rays from AGN disk coronae, originally intended for the explanation of Seyfert type X-ray emission. Methods. We perform an analysis of BeppoSAX data at different epochs, fitting the spectrum with a composition of a beamed “jet” component and our coronal model with a reflected component and an iron emission line. Results. We obtained reasonable fits of BeppoSAX spectra at different epochs by changing the relative weight of our emission model and of the jet power-law component. We find that in all these cases the low energy (≤2 keV) part of the X-ray spectrum is accounted for by our Seyfert-like model; we also verify the existence of a positive correlation between the Seyfert-like component 2–10 keV flux and the 0.2–2 keV flux of the so-called soft excess. Conclusions. The results outlined above confirm the plausibility of our non-thermal flare-like coronal model as a possible interpretation of Seyfert-like emission in AGNs. We can conclude that the interpretation of the Seyfert-like component in terms of our non-thermal corona model is offering, as a natural result, a description of the soft excess origin, which is still the subject of lively debate.
Rising Stars, Superstars and Dying Stars: Hedonic Explorations of Autograph Prices

Key studies have explored the economics of rising stars, superstars and ‘has beens’, but relatively little economic literature exists on the associated parallel memorabilia markets. Using a random sample of 1151 pieces of autographed artefacts, on sale through a retail and internet outlet, hedonic analysis is undertaken to elicit significant characteristics in price determination. The data principally consists of autographs of past and current cultural icons along with some sporting and historical figures. We explore, inter alia, price differences with respect to ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ signatories, gender, sphere of fame, nationality, the age of the signatory and the nature of the artefact on which the signature is written. Alternative model specifications have been explored and compared. A notable difference emerges between those autographs with photographs and those without. There are also differences in prices according to whether individuals had been famous for their roles in just films, just television, or in both.
Characteristics of ion cyclotron emission on ASDEX upgrade

Figure 1: Configuration of voltage and RF probes on ASDEX Upgrade. Measurements were carried out on ASDEX Upgrade from 2009 to 2011 with two cross-dipole antennas located in the vacuum vessel (see Figure 1). They pick up both electromagnetic and electrostatic parts of received waves. An additional voltage probe is located inside an ICRH antenna behind the Faraday Shield (with around 30dB attenuation). The probes are connected to an Acqiris digitizer with 100MHz bandwidth, 250MS/s sampling rate and 12bits resolution. Each channel has a limited memory of 2MB, limiting the record to 8ms. To get the temporal evolution of the instability during longer timescales of several seconds, the signals are sampled for 6μs every 15ms. Before being digitized, signals are filtered to remove the main ICRF frequency and amplified with a 30dB low noise amplifier (Mini-Circuits ZFL-500LN) to get a better Signal to Noise Ratio.
Speed of Adjustment and Financial Constraints: Evidence from the UK

Our paper estimates the speed of moment adjustment based on the first difference of the lead (t 1) leverage levels (actual lead) and lag (t-1) leverage levels (actual lag) to the first difference of simulated lead (target) leverage levels and lag levels (actual lag leverage) for firm level data. We introduce an intrinsic limitation (financial constraints) to the model to test the impact on speed of adjustment and distance reduction. We find that financial constraints have a statistically and economically significant impact on rate of adjustment and distance reduction to target leverage levels.
Groundwater fluxes within sandy beaches: swash-driven flow vs cross-barrier gradients

This communication reports on a field experiment carried out on a microtidal beach in Camargue, France. The analysis is built on the initial work presented by Sous et al. (2016) on swash-groundwater dynamics. The analysis of a cross-shore network of buried pressure sensors allows to monitor the watertable dynamics over the full 2013-2014 winter season. The pressure head gradients are observed to be primarily seaward, forced by a higher level at the landward boundary. The groundwater flux is driven by the relative fluctuations of Still Water Level and inland elevations. Rain and tides have a little effect. A nearly isolated groundwater circulation is driven by wave activity below the swash zone whatever the overall watertable gradient. Estimations of beach groundwater discharge over the Gulf of Beauduc reveal the importance of beach groundwater in the exchanges between coastal aquifer and open sea.
Why Reading Is Not a Natural Process.

The NICHD has been studying normal reading development and reading difficulties for 35 years. NICHD-supported researchers have studied more than 10,000 children, published more than 2,500 articles, and written more than 50 books that present the results of 10 large-scale longitudinal studies and more than 1,500 smaller scale experimental and cross-sectional studies. Many of the longitudinal research sites initiated studies in the early 1980s with kindergarten children before they began their reading instruction and have studied the children over time. Researchers have studied some children for 15 years, with several sites following the youngsters for at least 5 years. Additional research sites have joined within the past 3 years to investigate the effects of different reading instructional programs with kindergarten and 1st grade children. At most research sites, multidisciplinary research teams study cognitive, linguistic, neurobiological, genetic, and instructional factors related to early reading development and reading difficulties. 1
Evaluating the Drivers of Seasonal Streamflow in the U.S. Midwest

Streamflows have increased notably across the U.S. Midwest over the past century, fueling a debate on the relative influences of changes in precipitation and land cover on the flow distribution. Here, we propose a simple modeling framework to evaluate the main drivers of streamflow rates. Streamflow records from 290 long-term USGS stream gauges were modeled using five predictors: precipitation, antecedent wetness, temperature, agriculture, and population density. We evaluated which predictor combinations performed best for every site, season and streamflow quantile. The goodness-of-fit of our models is generally high and varies by season (higher in the spring and summer than in the fall and winter), by streamflow quantile (best for high flows in the spring and winter, best for low flows in the fall, and good for all flow quantiles in summer), and by region (better in the southeastern Midwest than in the northwestern Midwest). In terms of predictors, we find that precipitation variability is key for modeling high flows, while antecedent wetness is a crucial secondary driver for low and median flows. Temperature improves model fits considerably in areas and seasons with notable snowmelt or evapotranspiration. Finally, in agricultural and urban basins, harvested acreage and population density are important predictors of changing streamflow, and their influence varies seasonally. Thus, any projected changes in these drivers are likely to have notable effects on future streamflow distributions, with potential implications for basin water management, agriculture, and flood risk management.
Need for Cognition Moderates Responses to Framed Smoking‐Cessation Messages1

Smoking-cessation messages usually emphasize the costs of continuing to smoke (lossframed). However, prospect theory suggests that messages that instead emphasize the benefits of quitting smoking (gain-framed) could be more effective than loss-framed messages because smoking cessation is likely viewed as a cancer-prevention behavior with a certain rather than a risky outcome. In this study, smokers at public events read brochures containing brief gain- or loss-framed smoking-cessation messages. The influence of framing was moderated by participants’ need for cognition (NFC). Individuals lower in NFC had greater intention to quit after reading a gain-framed message than after reading a lossframed message— a finding consistent with our predictions— whereas framing did not affect the persuasiveness of messages among people higher in NFC.
Empirical Research On Electronic Commerce Adoption Decision-making Factors in China SMEs

Based on some theories, seven factors about Electronic Commerce (E-commerce) adoption in Small and Middle Sized Enterprises (SMEs) is determined. Based on the statistic data of 278 companies, a structure equation model is constructed. The result indicates that pressure, top manager support, applicability have direct positive effect on E-commerce adoption in SMEs, and the other factors (staff matching, technology feasibility, environment, organizational security), have positive effect on E-commerce adoption in SMEs via above direct factors. The research provides a system perspective to adopt E-commerce on SMEs. Keywords -Small and Middle Sized Enterprises; Electronic Commerce; adoption; decision-making; structure equation model 1. Introduction E-commerce provides SMEs with the platform which can compete fairly with big business, and brings economic benefits, so in the last few years E-commerce in SMEs develops rapidly in China. A lot of decision makers in SMEs is still in the sidelines of whether to develop E-commerce, because of the weekness of their own businesses in the information construction of the scale, capital and management. The majority of SMEs are facing the confusion of the E- commerce application: if it is necessary to adopt E-commerce? Which are the E-commerce adoption decision-making factors? Aiming at these issues, the theoretical and empirical research and exploration is carried in this paper. 2. Review of Related Literature E-commerce is the information technology innovation from the technical perspective, and from the management perspective it is organization innovation and business model innovation, its adoption will be influenced by many factors. Some experts analyze and study the issue from different perspective.
An Experimental Evaluation of LTE-A Throughput for Drones

This work presents an experimental performance study on the wireless communication of a quadrocopter connected to an LTE-Advanced network. Measurements of TCP traffic analyze how the received power level, signal-to-interference ratio, and throughput depend on the flight height. An average throughput of 20 Mb/s in the downlink and 40 Mb/s in the uplink is achieved at 150 m. We also show how the number of line-of-sight links to base stations rises with height and leads to an increased handover rate.
STRATEGIES FOR PLANNED GROWTH TO INTERNATIONAL MARKETS An application to the SME APPISTEAR

El presente trabajo de investigacion tiene el objetivo de encontrar la estrategia mas adecuada para llevar la PyME mexicana de Appistear a un mercado internacional, principalmente enfocado a Latinoamerica, por lo que nuestra investigacion se torna en funcion de la pregunta de investigacion ? Cual es la estrategia de internacionalizacion optima para la PyME de Appistear? , utilizando un metodo cualitativo basado en las teorias revisadas en el curso, se obtiene la mejor estrategia para el caso especifico de Appistear.
Metabolic rate of late Holocene freshwater fish: evidence from δ13C values of otoliths

Abstract We examine patterns of intra-otolith variation in δ13C values of fossil Aplodinotus grunniens (freshwater drum) otoliths recovered from an archeological site in northeast Tennessee. We find three repeatable patterns: an initial increase early in ontogeny followed by relatively stable δ13C values as the fish ages, an initial strong covariation between seasonal δ18O and δ13C values, and a decrease with age in the magnitude of seasonal change in δ13C values. These last two observations are illustrated by seasonal least-squares linear regressions between δ13C and δ18O values that tend to progressively decrease in r2 value and slope with fish age. These patterns are evaluated by using a mass balance model in which otolith δ13C values are derived from dissolved inorganic carbon of ambient water mixing with carbon derived from metabolic processes. The proportion of metabolically derived carbon is found to be the dominant factor controlling intra-otolith variation in δ13C values. Thus, the difference between maximum and minimum δ13C values from a single otolith (δ13Cmax–min) is postulated to reflect the total change in metabolic rate over the lifetime of a fish. δ13Cmax–min values significantly and negatively covary with average δ18O(CaCO3) values, suggesting either a higher total change in metabolic rate over the lifetime of a fish in cooler climates characterized by shorter growing seasons, or a decrease in summer/winter precipitation ratio. A proxy for metabolic rate preserved in otoliths would facilitate the understanding of evolutionary history in physiological traits of fishes and improve our understanding of bioenergetics.
An Efficient GPU Cache Architecture for Applications with Irregular Memory Access Patterns

GPUs provide high-bandwidth/low-latency on-chip shared memory and L1 cache to efficiently service a large number of concurrent memory requests. Specifically, concurrent memory requests accessing contiguous memory space are coalesced into warp-wide accesses. To support such large accesses to L1 cache with low latency, the size of L1 cache line is no smaller than that of warp-wide accesses. However, such L1 cache architecture cannot always be efficiently utilized when applications generate many memory requests with irregular access patterns especially due to branch and memory divergences that make requests uncoalesced and small. Furthermore, unlike L1 cache, the shared memory of GPUs is not often used in many applications, which essentially depends on programmers. In this article, we propose Elastic-Cache, which can efficiently support both fine- and coarse-grained L1 cache line management for applications with both regular and irregular memory access patterns to improve the L1 cache efficiency. Specifically, it can store 32- or 64-byte words in non-contiguous memory space to a single 128-byte cache line. Furthermore, it neither requires an extra memory structure nor reduces the capacity of L1 cache for tag storage, since it stores auxiliary tags for fine-grained L1 cache line managements in the shared memory space that is not fully used in many applications. To improve the bandwidth utilization of L1 cache with Elastic-Cache for fine-grained accesses, we further propose Elastic-Plus to issue 32-byte memory requests in parallel, which can reduce the processing latency of memory instructions and improve the throughput of GPUs. Our experiment result shows that Elastic-Cache improves the geometric-mean performance of applications with irregular memory access patterns by 104% without degrading the performance of applications with regular memory access patterns. Elastic-Plus outperforms Elastic-Cache and improves the performance of applications with irregular memory access patterns by 131%.
The Impact of the Balanced Scorecard on Corporate Performance: The Case of an Australian Public Sector Enterprise

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of a corporate scorecard system inspired by the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) adopted in a public sector commercial entity in Australia. Based upon a case study on the Freemantle Port Authority, Western Australia this paper shows that although the policy to adopt the scorecard was legally imposed from outside, it has significant impacts on the organizational structure, operation as well as the overall performance of the organization. A main contribution of this paper is that it demonstrates that a coherent link between the polices and rules imposed from outside and strategies and performance measurement systems developed and used inside organization is a key factor in achieving expected outcomes of new managerial innovation practices.
An explicit algebraic subgrid stress model for LES of rotating flows

A new explicit SGS stress model based on the same methodology that leads to the EARSM for RANS is proposed. It involves both the resolved strain rate and rotation rate t ensors. The new model can account for frame rotation by incorporating it in the rotation rate tensor and the model is validated for rotating turbulent channel flow. Near wall damping of the Rotta constant, c1, together with the avoidance of the eddy viscosity assumpti on improves the description of the anisotropy tensor at both grid level and s ubgrid scale level compared to a dynamic Smagorinsky model. Moreover, the new model improves the near-wall behav iour of the resolved kinetic energy at various rotation rates. Key-words : subgrid modelling ; rotating flows ; LES
Simulation of Irregular Waves in a Numerical Wave Tank

Abstract The time domain boundary element method was utilized to simulate the propagation of the irregular waves in a numerical wave tank. The problem was solved in a time-marching scheme, upon the irregular waves being fed through the inflow boundary, in which the theoretical solution was obtained from the wave energy spectrum. The open boundary condition was modeled by the multi transmitting formula (MTF), in which the phase velocity was calculated according to the Sommerfeld’s condition. The velocity potential and wave elevation were directly obtained by integrating the free surface condition twice, with respect to time. The accuracy of the developed numerical scheme was verified by simulating the propagation of irregular waves. The numerical results show good agreements with the analytical solutions, which prove that the proposed scheme is a promising way to the simulation of wave-body interactions.
GC-MS Analysis and Antibacterial Activity of Trigonella foenumgraecum against Bacterial Pathogens

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the chemical composition of essential oil through GC-MS and look for new antibacterial drug agents from T. foenum graecum. Methods: Bacterial strains Sarcina lutea IFO 3232, Bacillus subtilis IFO 3026, Xanthomonas campestris IAM 1671, Escherichia coli IFO 3007, Klebsiella pneumoniae ATTC 10031, Proteus vulgaris MTCC 321 and Pseudomonas denitrificans KACC 32026 were used to measure the antibacterial activity by disc diffusion assay and therefore the chemical composition of essential oil through GC-MS. Results: GC–MS analysis of the essential oil from T. foenum graecum revealed the presence of fourteen different compounds of that Decane, 5, 6-bis (2, 2 dimethylpropylidene), (E,Z)-(19.58%); Hexadecanoic acid, methyl ester (18.81%); 5, 10-Diethoxy-2, 3, 7, 8-tetrahydro-1H,6H-dipyrrolo[1, 2-a;1’, 2’-d] pyrazine (5.81%) and Octadecanoic acid, methyl ester (3.28%) were the major compounds and therefore the minor compounds were Oxiraneoctanoic acid, 3-octyl, methyl ester; Hexadecanoic acid, ethyl ester; 6-Octadecenoic acid; Cis-Calamenene; 2-Pentadecanone, 6, 10, 14-trimethyl; 1, 2, 3, 4 Tetrahydroisoquinolin6-ol-1-carboxylic acid and Murolan-3, 9(11)-diene-10-peroxy. Essential oil (300 µg/disk) of T. foenum-graecum displayed antibacterial activity against Bacillus subtilis IFO 3026, Sarcina lutea IFO 3232, Xanthomonas campestris IAM 1671, Proteus vulgaris MTCC 321 and Pseudomonas denitrificans KACC 32026 with their respective zones of inhibition of 6.5 ± 0 to 8 ± 1.7 mm and the essential oil (150 µl/disk) displayed far greater potential antibacterial activity compare to those extracts against all experimental bacteria with their respective zones of inhibition of 8 ± 0 to 15 ± 0.7 mm. Conclusion: This experiment showed a great potential of antibacterial activity against gram positive and gram negative bacteria. The results of this study counsel that T. foenum-graecum might have potential use as antibacterial agents.