Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Challenging the liberal international order by chipping away at US Structural power: China’s state-guided investment in technology and finance in Russia

Abstract This paper examines China’s investments in Russia as a case study of China’s challenge to the liberal order. It surveys the political economy of China’s state-owned enterprises—the primary vehicles for China’s investments in Russia—in a global context. It argues that China’s investments in Russia constitute an emerging structural economic challenge to the liberal international order. The trend of China’s investments in Russia illustrates Beijing’s strategy of fostering global economic integration that ultimately may not conform to the geopolitical underpinnings of a liberal international order. It looks at two cases of China’s investments in Russia: the technology sector and the financial sector. It shows that the liberal order’s tension with China’s strategy vis-à-vis globalization is rooted in its impact on US structural power and suggests that the active presence of Chinese state-guided capital in Russia’s high-tech development and its financial system illustrate the nature of this challenge.
Grasping, Perching, And Visual Servoing For Micro Aerial Vehicles

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have seen a dramatic growth in the consumer market because of their ability to provide new vantage points for aerial photography and videography. However, there is little consideration for physical interaction with the environment surrounding them. Onboard manipulators are absent, and onboard perception, if existent, is used to avoid obstacles and maintain a minimum distance from them. There are many applications, however, which would benefit greatly from aerial manipulation or flight in close proximity to structures. This work is focused on facilitating these types of close interactions between quadrotors and surrounding objects. We first explore high-speed grasping, enabling a quadrotor to quickly grasp an object while moving at a high relative velocity. Next, we discuss planning and control strategies, empowering a quadrotor to perch on vertical surfaces using a downward-facing gripper. Then, we demonstrate that such interactions can be achieved using only onboard sensors by incorporating vision-based control and visionbased planning. In particular, we show how a quadrotor can use a single camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to perch on a cylinder. Finally, we generalize our approach to consider objects in motion, and we present relative pose estimation and planning, enabling tracking of a moving sphere using only an onboard camera and IMU. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics First Advisor Vijay Kumar
Evaluation of economic indicators for Czech dairy farms

Milk production is one of the most important areas of the Czech agrarian sector, as evidenced by its 50% share (at 2017 prices) in revenues from livestock production. As for any business, a certain level of profitability is a prerequisite for long-term and sustainable development of dairy farms. This study’s aim was to evaluate the economic efficiency of milk production from both Czech Fleckvieh (C) and Holstein (H) cows based on data collected each year from 48 to 70 Czech dairy farms in the period from 2012 to 2017. Total costs per feeding day and litre of milk, level of profitability, and income over feed costs were calculated. The influences of herd size and milk yield on profitability and break-even points were examined while sensitivity analysis and model calculations were utilised to predict profitability. The farms with higher average milk yields (>7 500 and >9 500 L per lactation for C and H, respectively) had higher costs per feeding day, lower costs per litre of milk, and improved profitability (p < 0.05). Average break-even points were estimated for milk price (0.31 and 0.32 EUR) and milk yield (7 257 and 9 209 L) in C and H herds, respectively.
Measuring Student Learning And Engagement In An Introductory Electrical Science Course

Does encouraging student development through projects increase engagement in a course? Can we use student performance on case studies to measure learning? These questions arose in discussions among faculty and teaching assistants in the Introduction to Electrical Science course at Oklahoma State University who perceived student engagement is less when students do not apply the skills learned in the course. The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University (OSU) is redesigning courses to improve student learning under a National Science Foundation (NSF) Department Level Reform projectEngineering Students for the 21 st Century (ES21C). This project seeks to develop higher levels of learning by matching course work to objectives using Bloom’s Taxonomy. The introductory electrical science course is being reformed to increase students’ ability to analyze and apply knowledge by incorporating new problem-based and active learning techniques into the course. These techniques include individual web-based pre-lecture assignments, team projects, individual and group quizzes, in-class laboratory exercises presented as case studies, and combined traditional and case analysis exams. Ideally, students will be more engaged in the course and increase their depth of knowledge. In this paper we examine changes made to the course and what we hope to measure through these changes. A preliminary Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) survey along with an attitude questionnaire (created by undergraduates working on the NSF project ES21C) was given to students enrolled in the introductory electrical science course before changes were made.
Recycling Chips of Stainless Steel Using a Full Factorial Design

The aim of this study was to provide an experimental investigation on the novel method for recycling chips of duplex stainless steel, with the addition of vanadium carbide, in order to produce metal/carbide composites from a high-energy mechanical milling process. Powders of duplex stainless steel with the addition of vanadium carbide were prepared by high-energy mechanical ball milling utilizing a planetary ball mill. For this proposal, experiments following a full factorial design with two replicates were planned, performed, and then analyzed. The four factors investigated in this study were rotation speed, milling time, powder to ball weight ratio and carbide percentage. For each factor, the experiments were conducted into two levels so that the internal behavior among them could be statistically estimated: 250 to 350 rpm for rotation speed, 10 to 50 h for milling time, 10:1 to 22:1 for powder to ball weight ratio, and 0 to 3% carbide percentage. In order to measure and characterize particle size, we utilized the analysis of particle size and a scanning electron microscopy. The results showed with the addition of carbide in the milling process cause an average of reduction in particle size when compared with the material without carbide added. All the four factors investigated in this study presented significant influence on the milling process of duplex stainless steel chips and the reduction of particle size. The statistical analysis showed that the addition of carbide in the process is the most influential factor, followed by the milling time, rotation speed and powder to ball weight ratio. Significant interaction effects among these factors were also identified.
S‐wave in 2D acoustic transversely isotropic media with a tilted symmetry axis

In an acoustic transversely isotropic medium, there are two waves that propagate. One is the P‐wave and another one is the S‐wave (also known as S‐wave artefact). This paper is devoted to analyse the S‐wave in two‐dimensional acoustic transversely isotropic media with a tilted symmetry axis. We derive the S‐wave slowness surface and traveltime function in a homogeneous acoustic transversely isotropic medium with a tilted symmetry axis. The S‐wave traveltime approximations in acoustic transversely isotropic media with a tilted symmetry axis can be mapped from the counterparts for acoustic transversely isotropic media with a vertical symmetry axis. We consider a layered two‐dimensional acoustic transversely isotropic medium with a tilted symmetry axis to analyse the S‐wave moveout. We also illustrate the behaviour of the moveout for reflected S‐wave and converted waves.
Increasing the Take up of Cal Grants

Author(s): Linos, Elizabeth; Reddy, Vikash; Rothstein, Jesse | Abstract: Over 150,000 low- and moderate-income California high school graduates each year are eligible for CalGrant entitlement awards, which can cover full tuition and most fees at any of the three public higher education segments in the state, or can make substantial contributions toward tuition at private colleges. Unfortunately, many eligible students don’t take up the awards. Many may not be aware of their eligibility, know how to navigate the system, or feel like these funds are truly meant for them. In 2017-8, the California Policy Lab worked with the California Student Aid Commission to design and test more effective notifications to eligible high school seniors. The redesigned letters were clearer, shorter, and encouraged students to think of themselves as college-bound. The results were promising. Students who received the redesigned letters were much more likely to take the first step toward claiming the award than a randomly selected comparison group. Future analyses will measure impacts on college enrollment, CalGrant payouts, and eventual college completion.
Creativity Development of High-Achieving Students

Few studies on creativity have focused on creativity development in various grade levels for high-achieving students. The purpose of this study was to explore the developmental trajectories of creative ability for high-achieving students. The participants constituted a national representative sample of 982 male (N = 506) and female (484) students from grades 1 to 10 in five governorates in Oman (Muscat, South-Al Batinah, South- Al Sharqia, Dhofar, and Al Dhakilia). The students completed two subtests of the Profile of Creative Abilities (PCA), a measure of creative potential, namely drawings and categories. There was an evidence of a developmental trend of creativity across grade levels. The Multi-variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that the main effect of grade was statistically significant for the drawings subtest. Also, the main effect of gender was also statistically significant for the drawings subtest. The main effect of interaction (gender X grade) was not significant. Overall, females’ creative performance was significantly better than males’ in the Creativity Index score. The results of the study are discussed in the light of existing literature about developmental trends and gender differences in creative thinking.
A MODEL FOR ADOPTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR E-LEARNING: A CONCEPTUAL VIEW

The cost of higher education (HE) is constantly increasing with less public funding and yet the demand is increasing causing institutions to search for ways of reducing costs while improving delivery as well as competitiveness in the global market. Cloud Computing (CC) is a potential solution because it has the capability for end users to seamlessly access data and applications from multiple devices and platforms. However, research findings indicate that the rate of adoption and subsequent deployment within higher educational institutions (HEIs) compared to other sectors is low. This study is therefore investigating the responsible factors and their dynamics. As universities readjust to demands due to globalization and internationalization, it is expected that the findings of this research will aid HEIs to make informed strategic decisions about adoption of CC technology.
Immigration and Crimes Against Natives: The 2015 Refugee Crisis in Germany

In the 2015 refugee crisis, nearly one million refugees came to Germany, raising concern that crimes against natives would rise. Using novel county-level data, we study this question empirically in first-difference and 2SLS regressions. Our results do not support the view that Germans were victimized in greater numbers by refugees as measured by their rate of victimization in crimes with refugee suspects. Our findings are of great policy and public interest, and also of material relevance for the broader literature on immigration and crime which considers only crimes per capita or variants thereof, but never actual crimes by foreigners against natives. We show that this shortcoming can lead to biased inference.
Gender, Race, and Diversity Values Among Local Government Leaders

Despite the increased emphasis placed on diversity and inclusion, there is relatively little research that focuses on diversity values in small and medium-sized cities. This research uses data from a 2016 nationally representative survey to investigate how city department leaders’ perceptions of their organizations valuing diversity are related to the identity of the department head, the mayor, and the community. We find that women and people of color are underrepresented in city department leadership. Reporting that one’s organization values racial and gender diversity is significantly related to respondent gender, respondent race (for women), mayoral race (for women), and diversity in the community (for men), and that the interaction of mayoral and community identity is related to perceived diversity values. We conclude with a discussion of what these findings mean for diversity and inclusion in practice in local government departments, which often lack demographic diversity.
Challenges and Opportunities Brought to the Chinese Economy by Brexit and the New US Administration

The impact of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president in the context of stock market reactions and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) within three key zones in ‘the Greater China Region’ (Hong Kong, Taiwan and China Mainland) are examined in this article. The chosen research period is from January 2014 to June 2017, and the EPU Index in the USA and the UK is used as a proxy to measure political uncertainty in two of the world major economies and how they impact on the Chinese stock market. The main contribution of the article can be found in the analysis of how stock market performance can be driven by policy-related uncertainty shocks in the international context. The results show that the stock markets in the ‘Greater China Region’ did not seem to react either to the uncertainty generated by Brexit or to the election of Donald Trump, implying that the Chinese stock markets appear to be quite resilient to the recent political events that have been disrupting the global economy. JEL codes: G58, G15, G18
Survey Paper on DVFS-based Power Aware Scheduling

In cloud computing, the energy aware scheduling problem has been a critical issue in high-performance clouds. High energy consumption leads to high CO2 emission. An existing technique Dynamic voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) minimizes energy consumption for data center which will result in the less number of carbon footprints without compromising Quality Of Service (QoS). The goal of the proposed work is to reduce energy consumption while processing requests. DVFS allows host CPUs to dynamically change power state when resource demands are low to reduce a host’s energy consumption. This survey paper discusses the various methods used to reduce energy consumption and scheduling algorithms in cloud computing.
Assessment of cognitive load through biometric monitoring

— This study explored the relationship between human biometric signals, such as heart rate, galvanic skin response (GSR) and skin temperature, and cognitive load induced by a secondary cognitive task in a simulated driving environment. NERVteh motion-based driving simulator [1] was used to simulate an immersive driving environment. Microsoft wrist band was used for collection of driver biometric data. Cognitive load was induced with the Delayed Digit Recall Task ( n – back task) [2] and the Detection Response task (DRT) [3] was used as a reference measurement. The results show that it is possible to reliably detect changes in cognitive load with a low cost device, such as the Microsoft wristband 2 [4]; however, specific cognitive difficulty levels cannot be differentiated. Galvanic skin response and skin temperature showed to be better indicators for increased cognitive load compared to mean heart rate data, when performing measurements with a low cost wristband.
Biowaste Management in Italy: Challenges and Perspectives

The aim of this work is the development of a methodology for the technical and environmental assessment of biowaste valorization in 2G biorefineries. Italy was chosen as case study, considering years 2016–2017. Approach: the Italian context was evaluated through the following key parameters: Gross domestic power, climate, demography, and population density distribution described the Italian framework. The four most abundant biowaste categories were defined through their amounts and geo-localization: wastewater and sewage sludge (WSS, 4.06 Mt/y), organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW, 1.7 Mt/y), agricultural livestock waste (ALW, 5.7 Mt/y), and waste deriving from the food industry (FIW, 2.6 Mt/y). The geo-localization and quantitative evaluations of the available biowaste amounts were aimed at defining the dimension and localization of the biorefinery plant and at optimizing supply and transport chains, while the qualitative characteristic were aimed to evaluate the most promising process among thermo-valorization (TH) and anaerobic digestion (AD). Results: All considered biowastes were appropriate for biorefinery processes, since carbon content exceeds 40% and the carbon–nitrogen ratio was between 10 and 30. All biowaste categories were evaluated as feedstocks for two biorefinery processes: anaerobic digestion (AD) and thermo-valorization (TH) with energy recovery. Compared to TH, AD achieved in all cases the best performances in terms of produced energy and avoided CO2 emissions. The primary energy production of AD and TH for WSS, OFMSW, ALW, and FIW were respectively: 7.89 vs. 2.4 kWh/kg; 8.7 vs. 2.6 kWh/kg; 10.85 vs. 5.5 kWh/kg; and 12.5 vs. 7.8 kWh/kg. The main findings of this work were: the adoption of AD was technically more suitable than TH; AD increased the avoided CO2 emissions of 10%–89.9% depending on biowaste category.
Roles of Environmental System Knowledge in Promoting University Students’ Environmental Attitudes and Pro-Environmental Behaviors

This study aims to investigate the role of environmental system knowledge in promoting pro-environmental behaviors. Relationships between environmental knowledge and environmental attitudes as well as environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behaviors were analyzed. Environmental system knowledge includes knowledge of political ecology, sustainable development, environment and ecology, and environmental situations. This study included 128 students enrolling in the elective course entitled “Environment and Development” provided by the King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Bangkok city of Thailand and 150 students who were not participating in this course. The results revealed that environmental attitudes of students participating in the course was significantly higher than that of students not attending the course. Only knowledge of the environment and ecology highly correlated with environmental attitudes; on the other hand, diverse environmental knowledge significantly correlated with pro-environmental behaviors. The result also demonstrated that indirect impact environmental behaviors reported by both groups were statistically different, but there was no significant difference in direct impact environmental behaviors. This study suggested that environmental knowledge provided through a formal education could promote environmental attitudes, but it may not contribute to students’ engagement in direct impact environmental behaviors.
PAPR Reduction in MIMO-OFDM System Using SLM Without SI

Abstract MIMO-OFDM is a key technology being widely used these days for 4 G communication systems but its main drawback is high PAPR. Selected mapping is commonly used approach for PAPR reduction but in SLM there is requirement of side information (SI) to be sent along with the input data signal and leading to the loss in data rate and increased complexity. In this article, we have come up with a technique for PAPR reduction in which there is no requirement of transmission of side information and therefore preserves the data rate and also provides sufficient reduction in the PAPR. In this technique, SI embedding is performed in the form of subcarrier location (index) by increasing its power. The simulation results demonstrate that the scheme which has been proposed provides the favorable response in terms of bit error rate (BER), PAPR reduction and SI detection capability.
Robust obstacle detection for unmanned surface vehicles

Obstacle detection is of essential importance for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). Although some obstacles (e.g., ships, islands) can be detected by Radar, there are many other obstacles (e.g., floating pieces of woods, swimmers) which are difficult to be detected via Radar because these obstacles have low radar cross section. Therefore, detecting obstacle from images taken onboard is an effective supplement. In this paper, a robust vision-based obstacle detection method for USVs is developed. The proposed method employs the monocular image sequence captured by the camera on the USVs and detects obstacles on the sea surface from the image sequence. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme is efficient to fulfill the obstacle detection task.
Electricity Cost Minimization for Interruptible Workload in Datacenter Servers

Datacenters have experienced dramatic growth in recent years, and the cost for powering them has become a significant problem. This paper proposes methods to minimize the energy cost for performing a task on a datacenter server before a deadline. We observe that energy prices fluctuate over time, and schedule the task to execute in periods of relatively low cost, despite not having knowledge of future costs during the execution. This problem is studied in several models, starting with an online setting where electricity prices can change arbitrarily. A <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sqrt{\varphi }$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:msqrt><mml:mi>φ</mml:mi></mml:msqrt></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq1-2759206.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-competitive algorithm is proposed, where <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\varphi$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>φ</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq2-2759206.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> is the ratio between the maximum and minimum electricity prices, and this algorithm is also shown to be optimal by proving a matching lower bound. Next, we consider a stochastic setting in which prices vary in a Markovian fashion and propose an optimal algorithm based on dynamic programming. We then study the performance of our algorithms in practice using prices derived from real world data. The results show that the stochastic algorithm is very effective, and achieves cost that is within 3.4 percent of the optimum. Moreover, it performs well compared to several heuristics used in practice.