Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes? Evidence from German State Reforms of Compulsory Religious Education

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing compulsory religious education significantly reduced religiosity of affected students in adulthood. It also reduced the religious actions of personal prayer, church-going, and church membership. Beyond religious attitudes, the reform led to more equalized gender roles, fewer marriages and children, and higher labor-market participation and earnings. The reform did not affect ethical and political values or non-religious school outcomes.
Verificação Baseada em Indução Matemática para Programas C/C++

Resumo—O método k-induction tem sido aplicado com sucesso para verificar projetos de hardware (representados como máquinas de estado finito) usando um solucionador de Satisfatibilidade Booleana. No entanto, as primeiras tentativas para aplicar esta técnica a projetos de software são recentes. Neste artigo, será apresentado um novo algoritmo de prova por indução, que utiliza uma abordagem de aprofundamento iterativo e checa, para cada passo até um valor máximo, se uma dada propriedade de segurança faz parte do sistema. Para lidar com o aumento da complexidade do software, um solucionador das teorias do módulo da satisfatibilidade é usado para resolver as condições de verificação geradas pelo algoritmo k-induction. Os resultados experimentais mostram que o algoritmo proposto é capaz de verificar uma grande variedade de propriedades de segurança, extraı́das de benchmarks padrões, que vão desde propriedades de alcançabilidade à restrições temporais.
Using SAR Interferometry for Detecting Landslides and Subsidence in the Coal Basin in Northern Bohemia

This article describes the possibilities and applications of active remote sensing. It also considers using SAR interferometry techniques in geotechnical applications in northern Bohemia. First of all, is this problem connected with SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar). This is the kind of radar that scans Earth surface by receiving and measuring not only delay and amplitude of reflected signal, but also frequency and phase. This helps resolving the problem of resolution in flight direction and it is possible to receive data in resolution about three orders higher. This radar is named coherent radar and it is the basic condition for using the SAR interferometry method. In principle, radar interferometry in digital processing is comparison of corresponding pixels in two images of the same area acquired in a very little different looking angles. Generating the interferogram involves only pixelwise subtraction of the phases of both images. Phase difference is closely connected with difference in distance between Earth surface and the satellite. The advantage of the method is the possibility of very accurate measurements of this phase difference. The method can be applied for topographic mapping with relative precission of 10 – 15 m, deformation mapping with precission less than 1 cm, another possibility is thematic mapping based on change detection, and last one is measuring the atmospheric influence on satellite movements. We can see wide use of this method but in practice, obtaining data with such high precision is difficult, because it’s very sensitive on many events. For instance a wet surface, snow or vegetation has a significant influence on surface features in longer time periods, and the interferometry method is impossible to use due to decorrelation. Our project is focused on using of the conventional interferometry for monitoring landslides and ground displacements caused by mining activities in northern Bohemia. We are using data from European satellites ERS 1 and ERS 2 (Earth Resource Satellite). Hence ERS 1 is over we plan to use data from the new biggest remote sensing satellite, ENVISAT. In our whole solution we wanted to use only free software products, but the step named SAR processing is not covered be this kind of service, so we used SAR processor developed in Indian Bombay University. For an intereferometric processing, open-source product DORIS is used. A digital elevation model (DEM) was successfully derived from a tandem pair. This topographic information serves as input into so called three pass interferometry where three scenes are needed. One topographic pair and one differential one, which should already contain deformation. The purpose of our research is to test this method and compare the results with different ground based methods on specified area of the open brown coal mine Chabarovice. Unfortunately, deformation interferogram doesn’t show good results in the place. Next step is to improve method using or developing different algorithms, and using data selected with different criteria.
A Study of Radiation Doses to the Patient and Medical Team at Embolization Procedures

Materials and Methods: We examined data from brain embolization (n = 30), hepatic chemoembolization (n = 50), and uterine embolization (n = 12). The PSDs were measured using radiochromic film around the patient’s head (group 1) or abdominal/pelvic region (group 2). Acquisition technical data and kerma-area products (KAP) were also recorded. Occupational doses were measured using InstadoseTM dosimeters near the left eye region (LER), chest, and left ankle.
MLS / ERD : A Tool for Building Multilevel Secure Entity Relationship Diagrams

Entity Relationship models, which are popular high-level conceptual data models, are frequently used for the conceptual design of database applications. Unfortunately, there are no specific tools for drawing such models, especially when designing multilevel databases. In this work, we build a tool – MLS/ERD – that will allow users to easily and clearly design multilevel databases.
Generative One-Class Models for Text-based Person Retrieval in Forensic Applications

Automatic forensic image analysis assists criminal investigation experts in the search for suspicious persons, abnormal behaviors detection and identity matching in images. In this paper we propose a person retrieval system that uses textual queries (e.g., "black trousers and green shirt") as descriptions and a one-class generative color model with outlier filtering to represent the images both to train the models and to perform the search. The method is evaluated in terms of its efficiency in fulfilling the needs of a forensic retrieval system: limited annotation, robustness, extensibility, adaptability and computational cost. The proposed generative method is compared to a corresponding discriminative approach. Experiments are carried out using a range of queries in three different databases. The experiments show that the two evaluated algorithms provide average retrieval performance and adaptable to new datasets. The proposed generative algorithm has some advantages over the discriminative one, specifically its capability to work with very few training samples and its much lower computational requirements when the number of training examples increases.
Representations of the Mapping Class Group of the Two Punctured Torus arising from Mathematical Physics

Two techniques for determining bases of horizontal sections of torus conformal block bundles are examined. The first technique consists of obtaining a Fuchsian differential equation whose solution space is the vector space of conformal blocks. This is done explicitly in a particular case. The second technique is based on free field representations. The particular case of the ŝl2(C) free field representation obtained in [1] is used to derive a basis of horizontal sections of the conformal block bundle in the case of level k spin 1/2-spin 1/2 torus conformal blocks. Such a basis provides a monodromy representation of the mapping class group of the two punctured torus. An explicit presentation of this mapping class group is given in terms of generators and relations. Finally infinitely many representations of this mapping class group are derived using the above basis, for arbitrary level k.
Risk Factors for Severe Acute Malnutrition in Children under the Age of Five Year in Sukkur

Background: Severe acute malnutrition (SAM) affects approximately 13 million children under the age of 5 year and is associated with 1-2 million preventable child deaths per year. Objectives: To determine the risk factors for severe acute malnutrition in children under the age of five year. Settings and duration: Nutrition stabilization center of Ghulam Muhammad Mahar Medical College Hospital Sukkur from February 2011 to January 2012. Patients and Methods: This was a prospective descriptive study. All children diagnosed as severe acute malnutrition defined as weight for height measurement of 3 SD below the mean World Health organization reference values or the presence of bilateral pitting edema of nutritional origin admitted in Nutrition Stabilization Center were included in this study. Results: Two hundred seventy (270) children were admitted during study period. The age ranged from 06 to 59 months. Maternal illiteracy was present in 216(80%) and paternal illiteracy in 180(66.7%) cases. Parents income was less than 5000/month in 198(73.3%) family size with more than 4 or more children was seen in 180(66.7%) cases. Exclusive breast feeding was present in only 70(25.9%) mixed feeding was seen in 170(62.9%) and only bottle feeding was seen in 30(11.1%) cases. Late weaning was started in 150(55.6%). Recurrent diarrhoea was seen in 120(44.4%). Conclusions: The common risk factors associated with severe acute malnutrition were parental illiteracy large family size poverty non exclusive breast feeding and recurrent diarrhoea. Policy message: To decrease childhood malnutrition mothers should be encouraged for exclusive breast feeding. Parents education can play an important role in improving child health.
The Effect of Prophetic Leadership on Employee Engagement At sufism-based Islamic Boarding School

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of prophetic leadership on employee engagement among educators in an Islamic boarding school. This research is a quantitative research data collection through surveys in the boarding school of Sufism based in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia, using a questionnaire to collect data. The study sample consisted of 161 educators boarding school. The data was analyzed using SEM with the AMOS 24 program, to test the effects Research findings showed a significant prophetic leadership influence employee engagement. Originality of this research lies both on the unit analysis of educators at sufism-base Islamic boarding school and the models that reflects the effects of prophetic leadership on employee engagement.
Retrieving Signals with Deep Complex Extractors

Recent advances have made it possible to create deep complex-valued neural networks. Despite this progress, many challenging learning tasks have yet to leverage the power of complex representations. Building on recent advances, we propose a new deep complex-valued method for signal retrieval and extraction in the frequency domain. As a case study, we perform audio source separation in the Fourier domain. Our new method takes advantage of the convolution theorem which states that the Fourier transform of two convolved signals is the elementwise product of their Fourier transforms. Our novel method is based on a complex-valued version of Feature-Wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) and serves as the keystone of our proposed signal extraction method. We also introduce a new and explicit amplitude and phase-aware loss, which is scale and time invariant, taking into account the complex-valued components of the spectrogram. Using the Wall Street Journal Dataset, we compared our phase-aware loss to several others that operate both in the time and frequency domains and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed signal extraction method and proposed loss.
Sizing router buffers (redux)

The queueing delay faced by a packet is arguably the largest source of uncertainty during its journey. It therefore seems crucial that we understand how big the buffers should be in Internet routers. Our 2004 Sigcomm paper revisited the existing rule of thumb that a buffer should hold one bandwidth-delay product of packets. We claimed that for long-lived TCP flows, it could be reduced by √N, where N is the number of active flows, potentially reducing the required buffers by well over 90% in Internet backbone routers. One might reasonably expect that such a result, which supports cheaper routers with smaller buffers, would be embraced by the ISP community. In this paper we revisit the result 15 years later, and explain where it has succeeded and failed to affect how buffers are sized.
Special Section: Mediators and pathways underlying the impact of economic inequality on children’s development Mediating pathways in the socio-economic gradient of child development: Evidence from children 6–42 months in Bogota

Research has previously shown a gap of near 0.5 of a standard deviation (SD) in cognition and language development between the top and bottom household wealth quartile in children aged 6–42 months in a large representative sample of lowand middle-income families in Bogota, using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development. The gaps in fine motor and socio-emotional development were about half that size. Developmental deficits increased with age. The current study explored the associations amongst child development, household socio-economic status (SES), and a set of potential mediating variables—parental characteristics, child biomedical factors, and the quality of the home environment—in this sample. We ran mediation tests to quantify the contribution of these variables to the SES gap, and explored the role of age as a moderator. Parental education, particularly maternal education, and the quality of the home environment mediated the SES gap in all outcomes examined. Height-for-age mediated a small amount of the deficit in language scales only. More educated mothers provided better home stimulation than less educated mothers and the home environment partly mediated the effect of maternal education. These results suggested that in interventions aimed at promoting child development, those focusing on the quality of the home environment should be effective.
Traditional healers and mental health care in the South African context

A number of African countries have made attempts to officially recognize traditional healers as health care providers and South Africa is no exception. South Africa has made substantial progress in officially recognizing traditional medicine and its integration into the primary healthcare system. The Traditional Health Practitioners Bill and the draft policy on African Traditional Medicine are examples of this. However, there is limited data on traditional healers and their practices specifically for mental health concerns. This thesis attempts to address this gap by conducting four separate studies. The first study examines the role of traditional healers in mental health seeking behaviour within a nationally representative sample of South African adults. South Africans who suffer from psychiatric disorders are treated by both Western and alternative practitioners, including traditional healers. However there is limited data on the frequency and predictors of such consultation. The data for this study was taken from the South African Stress and Health Study (SASH). This national survey was conducted using the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) to generate diagnoses based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), and included questions on treatment by Western and alternative practitioners. Results indicated that a minority of participants with a lifetime DSM-IV diagnosis obtained treatment from Western (29%) or alternative (20%) practitioners. Traditional healers were consulted by 9% of the respondents and 11% consulted a religious or spiritual advisor. Use of traditional healers in the full sample was predicted by older age, black race, unemployment, lower education and having an anxiety or a substance use disorder. In summary, alternative practitioners including traditional healers play an important role in the delivery of mental health care in South Africa. Although attention has previously been paid to the need for Western practitioners to collaborate with traditional healers in order to optimize health care in the country, the data here also emphasize the potential importance of working with religious and spiritual advisors. Study 2 examines traditional healers’ explanatory models (EMs) and treatment practices for psychotic and non-psychotic mental illnesses. In many traditional belief systems in Africa, including South Africa, mental health problems may be attributed to the influence of ancestors or bewitchment. Traditional healers are viewed as having expertise to address these Un ive rsi ty of ap e T ow n
ROS-based control for a robot manipulator with a demonstration of the ball-on-plate task

Robotics and automation are rapidly growing in the industries replacing human labor. The idea of robots replacing humans is positively influencing the business thereby increasing its scope of research. This paper discusses the development of an experimental platform controlled by a robotic arm through Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is an open source platform over an existing operating system providing various types of robots with advanced capabilities from an operating system to low-level control. We aim in this work to control a 7-DOF manipulator arm (Robai Cyton Gamma 300) equipped with an external vision camera system through ROS and demonstrate the task of balancing a ball on a plate-type end effector. In order to perform feedback control of the balancing task, the ball is designed to be tracked using a camera (Sony PlayStation Eye) through a tracking algorithm written in C++ using OpenCV libraries. The joint actuators of the robot are servo motors (Dynamixel) and these motors are directly controlled through a low-level control algorithm. To simplify the control, the system is modeled such that the plate has two-axis linearized motion. The developed system along with the proposed approaches could be used for more complicated tasks requiring more number of joint control as well as for a testbed for students to learn ROS with control theories in robotics.
Muller's ratchet with overlapping generations

Muller’s ratchet is a paradigmatic model for the accumulation of deleterious mutations in a population of finite size. A click of the ratchet occurs when all individuals with the least number of deleterious mutations are lost irreversibly due to a stochastic fluctuation. In spite of the simplicity of the model, a quantitative understanding of the process remains an open challenge. In contrast to previous works, we here study a Moran model of the ratchet with overlapping generations. Employing an approximation which describes the fittest individuals as one class and the rest as a second class, we obtain closed analytical expressions of the ratchet rate in the rare clicking regime. As a click in this regime is caused by a rare large fluctuation from a metastable state, we do not resort to a diffusion approximation but apply an approximation scheme which is especially well suited to describe extinction events from metastable states. This method also allows for a derivation of expressions for the quasi-stationary distribution of the fittest class. Additionally, we confirm numerically that the formulation with overlapping generations leads to the same results as the diffusion approximation and the corresponding Wright-Fisher model with non-overlapping generations.
Effects of Stretching Exercises on Horizontal Jumps of University Athletes

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of stretching exercises on University athletes’ performance in horizontal jump. The major objectives of the study were (a) to explore the impact of dynamic stretching exercises on horizontal jump of athletes; (b) to compare the effects of static stretching and dynamics stretching on horizontal jumping ability. The nature of the study was experimental and test used to gather information. A sample of ninety (90) students from the Islamia University of Bahawalpur were draw which was divided randomly into three groups (a) Control (b) static stretching (c) dynamic stretching. Before the training of all subjects pre-test were given standing Broad Jump and seven step jump. They Control group followed their daily routine life as usual, rest of two groups one as engaged in static stretching and other was in dynamic stretching. The duration of training for both groups was 8 weeks (forty days) in which subjects participated five (5) days a week consecutively for 45 minutes per session as per planned fixture. After training of all three groups were subjected to post-test. On the base of results it can be concluded that there is a strong statistical difference in performance of control group and static stretching group. Similarly there was a statistically strong difference of performance among experimental group and control group. Data further identified that there is significant variation between the results of static stretching group and dynamic stretching group. It can also be said that the component of dynamic stretching has more positive and significant effect on performance than static stretching. It is recommended that gradually. Dynamic stretching exercises improve the level of fitness specifically it helps to improve the main component speed and agility which should be performed in set of 8-12 repetitions.
2 Measuring Efficiency of Monetary Policy : the Farrell Measure Approach

Cecchetti et al. (2006) develop a method for allocating macroeconomic performance changes among the structure of the economy, variability of supply shocks and monetary policy. We propose a dual approach of their method by borrowing well-known tools from production theory, namely the Farrell measure and the Malmquist index. Following Färe et al (1994) we propose a decomposition of the efficiency of monetary policy. It is shown that the global efficiency changes can be rewritten as the product of the changes in macroeconomic performance, minimum quadratic loss, and efficiency frontier. JEL: E52, E58
A Life-Test Study of Electromigration in Microwave Power Transistors

A life-test study was made of a microwave power transistor-employing aluminum metallization. The life tests were conducted under dc overstress conditions to accelerate the rate of failure as a result of electro-migration of the metallization system. Extrapolation of the data obtained showed a predicted MTF of approximately one hundred years for the device under test at a typical operating-current density of 8.4 × 104 A/cm2 and junction temperature of 150°C. Analysis of the failures revealed the presence of both aluminum and silicon electromigration, with the latter the primary cause of failure, A failure-rate model was constructed from the data relating MTF to activation energy, temperature, and current density.