Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Climate Data Records from Merged CERES and Geostationary Imager Data

Stable climate data records from satellite-based instruments are required for the detection of subtle climate trends. Changes in availability of data, orbital characteristics, sampling patterns, and calibration can all cause spurious trends in climate records derived from space-based instruments. Greater stability in climate data records can be achieved by incorporating the varying strengths of multiple satellite-based instruments in different orbits. The operational products from the Clouds in the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) experiment are assimilating data from up to 8 separate spacecraft in order to produce the most accurate radiation budget data set to date. CERES has measured shortwave (SW: 0.3 – 5.0 μm) and longwave (LW: 5.0 – 200. μm) broadband radiance from five instruments on three spacecraft (Wielicki et al., 1996). The four instruments aboard The Terra and Aqua spacecraft are currently operating nominally with calibration accuracy of better than 1% in the SW and 0.5% in the LW with calibration stability of 0.1%/year. CERES has also greatly increased the accuracy the estimates on instantaneous flux from the radiance measurements via the production of improved angular distribution models (ADM) (Loeb et al., 2003a and 2003b). One area where the CERES climate record can be further improved through the use of additional data from other satellites is in the removal of temporal sampling errors. Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites such as Terra and Aqua cannot adequately define the diurnal cycle of radiation. Estimates of monthly mean flux based on a single sun-synchronous satellite can be biased by more than 20 W/m in climatic regions with pronounced diurnal cycles. Instruments aboard geostationary (GEO) satellites have the capability of viewing regions during the complete diurnal cycle. Unfortunately, except for the recently launched Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget Instrument (GERB), there are no well-calibrated broadband measurements available from GEO. Narrowband GEO data can be merged with CERES data to remove temporal sampling errors as long as careful consideration is given to calibration, spectral differences, and proper use of broadband ADM
MANDATORY AUDIT ROTATION AND AUDIT QUALITY: SURVEY OF SOUTHERN NIGERIA

Mandatory rotation of external auditors requires audit firms to be rotated after a specified number of years despite the quality, independence of the audit firm, the willingness of the shareholders and the management to keep the audit firm. This study is designed to determine the relationship between mandatory audit rotation and audit quality. The data used were collected through the distribution of questionnaires to investors, lecturers, consultants, accountants and auditors in southern Nigeria. The data was analyzed using percentage analysis while the specified model was estimated using binary logistic regression technique through computer software Eviews 7. One hypothesis was stated and tested. The binary logistic ordered regression shows that there exists a negative relationship between Mandatory Audit Rotation (MAT) and audit quality (AUDQ). We therefore recommended that other ways of improving audit quality should be explored such as strengthening the board of audit committee and encouraging Joint audit to avoid monopoly of audit opinion. Keywords: Mandatory Audit Rotation, Audit Quality, Southern Nigeria
Nanoscale surface roughness affects low Reynolds number flow: Experiments and modeling

Most micro-channel fabrication strategies generate nano-to-micro-scale, stochastic surface roughness. This inherent stochasticity can potentially be harnessed to direct microfluidic operations such as self-cleaning behavior and localized mixing. This work investigates the effect of stochastic nanoscale roughness on low to moderate Reynolds number Newtonian flow using concurrent modeling and experiments. We fabricate a microscopic channel with tailored hydrofluoric-acid-etched rough surfaces. Optical profilometry and micro-particle-image-velocimetry (micro-PIV) are used to characterize the surface roughness and flow field and is integrated with direct numerical simulation that resolves effects of nanoscale roughness. Results indicate that nanoscale roughness causes flow perturbations that extend up to the mid-plane and is insensitive to flow-rates.
Comparative studies of certain macro minerals during various reproductive states in buffaloes.

Thirty healthy Murrah buffaloes of 5-9 years of age in their second to fi fth lactation were randomly chosen from well-organized dairies located at Jabalpur and screened as per the approved technical programme to elucidate alteration in concentration of some macro elements (Na, K, Ca, P and Mg) in serum of normal cyclic, repeat breeder and anoestrus Murrah buffaloes. Gynecological examinations were employed for the diagnosis of reproductive states of animals. The selected 30 Murrah buffaloes were divided into three groups; each group comprised of 10 animals for the generation of experimental date. Blood samples were collected from animals of different groups on the day of estrus from normal cyclic, repeat breeder and anoestrus buffaloes on the same day as gynaecoclinical examination. The serum was prepared following routine procedure. The concentrations of total, free and bound forms of serum sodium, potassium and magnesium were non-signifi cant among the three groups. The total and free forms of serum calcium were signifi cantly (P<0.01) lower in anoestrus than in normal cyclic but repeat breeder group was similar to both the groups. Total and free forms of serum phosphorus concentration were signifi cantly higher (P<0.01) in normal cyclic as compared to repeat breeder and anoestrus in Murrah buffaloes. Differences in levels of bound forms of serum calcium and phosphorus were nonsignifi cant among the various groups.
Proceeding of the 33rd Sapporo Symposium on Partial Differential Equations

We can observe propagation phenomena modeled by reaction-diffusion equations in various fields of materials science, biology and life science. Corresponding to a wave propagation, the equations allow a traveling wave that has a constant profile and a constant speed. Historically, starting from the pioneering work by [5, 15], there are enormous number of papers for the study of traveling wave solutions (for instance see [1], [2], [4], [7], [10], [11], [13], [12], [19], [18], [17], [20], [21], and references therein). Here we consider a simple model equation, that is a scalar reaction-diffusion equation of one-space dimension ut = uxx + f(u) (x ∈ R) (1) with the condition f(0) = f(1) = 0, f ′(0) 6= 0, f ′(1) < 0. (2) The condition (2) tells that u = 0 and u = 1 are nondegenerate constant equilibria and that u = 1 is asymptotically stable. In addition to (2), if f satisfies f ′(0) > 0, f(u) 6= 0 (u 6= 0, 1), the equation (1) is called a monostable reaction-diffusion equation while if there is a number a ∈ (0, 1) such that f ′(0) < 0, f(a) = 0, f ′(a) > 0, f(u) 6= 0 (u 6= 0, a, 1), (1) is called a bistable reaction-diffusion equation. Typical examples of those cases are the Fisher-KPP equation with f(u) = u(1− u), (3) and the Nagumo equation with f(u) = u(1− u)(u− a), 0 < a < 1, (4)
International trade and endogenous growth: the case of Czech economy

The paper is focuses on testing of the presence of increasing returns to scale in the Czech economy production function that is constructed upon Solow growth accounting formula. The growth relation is adapted for imperfect competition in the goods market. In the second step the spillover effect to total factor productivity is tested based on import openness of the economy and share of productive equipment imports to gross domestic product. Using data on Czech economy in years 1993–2009 for OLS estimates, the presence of increasing returns to scale was proved in all tested models, the obtained returns to scale parameter is about 2. Explained variability is relatively poor for the full data sample, limiting the data range to 1999–2009 the model is able explain almost 57 %. Tests for spillover effect modeled through import shares do not bring evidence about appropriate significance, the common test of OLS approach indicated very low contribution for import variables in both versions.
Degrees of Self-Mappings of Seifert Manifolds with Finite Fundamental Groups

Summary. - We calculate all degrees of selfmaps f : M → M of a Seifert manifold M with fundamental group of finite order N, provided that f induces an automorphism of π1(M). The answer is given in terms of N, namely, the possible degrees degf form the set {k 2 + lN | gcd(k, N) = 1, k, l ∈ Z}.
Design Consideration of LLC Resonant Converter for Electrolyser

Electrolytic hydrogen offers a promising alternative for long-term energy storage of renewable energies (RE). The long-term excess energy with respect to load demand has been sent to the Electrolyser for hydrogen production and then the fuel cell has utilized this stored hydrogen to produce electricity when there were insufficient wind and solar energies with respect to load requirements. The RE system components have substantially different voltage-current characteristics and they are integrated on the DC bus through a power conditioning devices for optimal operation. The DC power required by the Electrolyser system is supplied by the DC-DC LLC resonant converter. The simulation and experimental results show that the power gain obtained by this method clearly increases the hydrogen production and storage rate from wind-PV systems.
Use of CPANS for grouping DNA sequence fragments in the construction of gnomes

This paper proposes the representation through the model of the High Level Parallel Compositions or CPANs, of the communication / interaction patterns denominated Pipeline and Farm, and their usefulness in combinatorial optimization problems within the classification of NP-hard problems such as grouping fragments of DNA sequences and assembly of these fragments to construct gnome; through a Structured Parallel Programming approach based on the concept of Parallel Objects. The Pipeline and Farm models are shown as CPANs under the Object Orientation paradigm and with them it is proposed the creation of a new CPAN that combines and uses the previous ones to solve the problem of obtaining and assembling Strings of DNA. Each CPAN proposal contains a set of predefined synchronization constraints between processes (maximum parallelism, mutual exclusion and synchronization of producer-consumer type), as well as the use of synchronous, asynchronous and asynchronous future modes of communication. We show the algorithm that solves the assembly of DNA sequences, their design and implementation as CPAN and the performance metrics in their parallel execution using multicores.
Is Marriage Always Good for Children?: Evidence from Families Affected by Incarceration

Never-married motherhood is associated with worse educational outcomes for children. But this association may reflect other factors that also determine family structure, rather than causal effects. We use incarceration rates for men as instrumental variables in estimating the effect of never-married motherhood on the high school dropout rate of black and Hispanic children. We find that unobserved factors drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child education, at least for children of women whose marriage decisions are affected by incarceration of men. For Hispanics we find evidence that these children actually may be better off living with a never-married mother.
Vertical Nanowire High-Frequency Transistors

This thesis explores a novel transistor technology based on vertical InAs nanowires, which could be considered both for low-power high-frequency analog applications and for replacing Si CMOS in the continued scaling of digital electronics. The potential of this device - the vertical InAs nanowire MOSFET – lies in the combination of the outstanding transport properties of InAs and the improved electrostatic control of the gate-all-around geometry. Three generations of the vertical InAs nanowire MOSFET are presented in this thesis; the first generation, integrated on semi-insulating InP substrate, provided the first RF measurements on vertical nanowire transistors with extrinsic ft/fmax > 7/20 GHz. Utilizing the resilience towards dislocations inherent to the vertical nanowire growth, the second generation is integrated on highly resistive Si substrates by a thin InAs buffer layer. The RF performance is comparable to the first generation, indicating sustained crystal quality of the nanowires. In the third generation, however, a great boost in the RF performance is achieved by removing excess metal overlap and, hence, reducing the parasitic gate capacitance, which resulted in extrinsic ft/fmax = 141/155 GHz at Lg ≈ 150 nm. The main challenge for III-V MOSFETs is the high-κ integration as high densities of charge traps deteriorate the device performance. Focusing on the border traps, a method based on frequency dispersion in gm (1 Hz-100 GHz) is developed for direct measurement of the trap density as a function of distance from the oxide-semiconductor interface. The method is demonstrated for vertical InAs nanowire MOSFETs and surface-channel InGaAs MOSFETs.
The relationship between the group and the individual and the acquisition of native speaker variation patterns: A preliminary study

Abstract The relationship between group and individual has been explored within the variationist paradigm. In L1, group patterns of variation are replicated by the individual. Second language acquisition research is concerned with the individual learner, but second language acquisition variationist researchers tend to group learners. Little empirical evidence exists that such grouping is valid, given the importance of individual variation. This article investigates whether it is meaningful to group learners. This is a longitudinal, quantitative study of the acquisition of variation by Irish speakers of French L2 over three years, of which one is a year abroad experience. Participants are five advanced learners, twenty years old, with five years of French classes at secondary school and two at university. A computer (Varbrul) analysis shows similar patterns in group and individual, in the deletion of ne. Theoretical implications are that it is legitimate to apply group standards to individual speakers and that native speaker variation acquisition is linked to a prolonged stay in the native speaker community.
An Analysis of the Process of Disinflationary Structural Change: The Case of Mexico

I study the diffusion process of permanent disinflationary shocks in the Mexican economy using disaggregated price data for 283 goods across 46 cities in the period 1995-2012. I first show that the distribution of shocks shows considerable heterogeneity, with more than 80% of all cases having experienced a break. I then show that both the likelihood and timing are spatially correlated across cities, and find a positive and concave relationship between CPI weights and the likelihood and timing of a break. These findings suggest that the process of structural change follows a diffusion process across the spatial and goods dimensions.
The Adoption of Management Accounting Practices in Malaysian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

This paper provides empirical evidence on the adoption of a broad range of management accounting practices in Malaysian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector. Data collected from a postal survey of 160 accountant managers are used to facilitate the study. The results indicate that the traditional MAPs such as conventional budgeting, traditional costing and financial performance measures are widely used by the respondents. The results also show that a significant number of respondents have adopted one or more measures both financial and non-financial but the reliance on financial measures is greater than for non-financial measures. The main non-financial measures frequently used by respondents are on-time delivery, number of customer complaints, defect rate and manufacturing lead time. These findings suggest that respondents, who use non-financial performance measures, are more internal-process and customer focused rather than employee focused. Further the recently developed management accounting techniques such as ABC, non-financial performance measures particularly on employees-oriented measures, decision support analysis and strategic management accounting are only adopted by the minority of the respondents. The respondents also indicated a low extent of use of all investment appraisal techniques in their decision making process. The finding suggests that given the relatively small size of the responding firms and due to some constraints, it is unlikely for the SMEs to adopt a comprehensive MAP in their firms.
Relação entre domínios de esquemas desconexão/rejeição e autonomia/desempenho prejudicados e dimensões clínicas de personalidade

Esquemas Iniciais Desadaptativos (EIDs) são padrões de respostas emocionais e cognitivas desenvolvidos pela interação entre personalidade e experiências na infância. O objetivo desse estudo foi investigar as relações entre os EIDs e as dimensões clínicas de personalidade em uma amostra não clínica. Para isso, 189 universitários responderam ao YSQ-S2, IDCP-2, BAI e BDI. Domínios de esquemas se correlacionaram com todas as dimensões clínicas de personalidade. Os dados sugerem que indivíduos com as dimensões Dependência, Instabilidade de Humor e Evitação a Críticas são mais suscetíveis a apresentarem esquemas dos domínios Desconexão/Rejeição e Autonomia e Desempenho Prejudicado. O trabalho permite a integração do estudo da Personalidade e da Terapia dos Esquemas.
The Eight Joint National Committee on Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of Hypertension (JNC 8); How it Differs from JNC 7 and the Clinical Implications

The global burden of disease has shifted from communicable to non-communicable disease. Hence, hypertension has achieved global significance. Hypertension related morbidity and mortality is quite high all over the world. Physicians require guidelines in management of hypertension that is based on best available scientific evidence so as to have improved patient's outcome and standardize their clinical practice. The aim of this review was to compare the most recent hypertension guideline released by the Eight Joint National Committee on Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of Hypertension (JNC 8) and the former (JNC 7), highlighting their differences and their clinical implications in patient's management.
Rule Equivalence for Error Detection

Grammars can be induced from treebanks for a potential variety (e.g., parsing), but this task faces two major problems. One is the existence of annotation errors in the treebank which can affect the final system performance (cf. [4]). The other is that the sheer number of rules is overwhelming for most applications. As Gaizauskas [6] and Krotov et al [10] point out, in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus, as part of the Penn Treebank [12], there are over 17,000 rules for 50,000 sentences. Not only is this an efficiency issues, but the presence of more rules for rare constructions can, for example, lead to worse parsing performance [5]. To address this second problem, grammar compaction methods have been developed to reduce the size of the rule set. One general approach is to identify the essential rules and keep only those. For example, Krotov et al [10] parse the righthand side of grammar rules and eliminate those rules which are parsable by other rules. With this method, they dramatically reduce the size of the grammar needed for parsing, but also potentially alter the structure of parses. Another approach is to identify the essential information encoded in a rule and keep only that information. As an example of this, Hepple and van Genabith [7] compact rules by merging node categories into supertags. For instance, comparative adjective (JJR) and superlative adjective (JJS) in the WSJ are combined into a single category. While the method preserves structure, the rule growth rate is still quite severe, reducing the full 17,000 rules to only approximately 11,000 rules. Keeping the essential information can alternatively be viewed as defining when different rules are equivalent. For this, we need some criteria by which to judge equivalence (or similarity) between rules, and these criteria might be applicationdependent. The grammar compaction methods above have focused on ways to compact rules for PCFG parsing, but we are interested in annotation error detection,
Functionalization of Nanostructured TiO2 Surfaces with ElectrodepositedStrontium Doped Calcium Phosphate and Evaluation of BSA Adsorptionfor Dental Implant Design

The aim of this work is to study the initial adsorption steps of strontium doped calcium phosphate compounds onto a nanostructured TiO2 surface and to evaluate its influence on the adsorption of Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA). TiO2 nanotubes (nT-TiO2) arrays were fabricated by anodic oxidation of titanium samples in a fluoride-based solution. Calcium phosphate (CaP) and Strontium doped calcium phosphate (Sr.CaP) have been deposited using pulsed electrodeposition process. Surface nanostructuration (nT-TiO2) allows the creation of specific reactive sites on TiO2 surfaces which are not existed on non-nanostructured ones. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) reveals that the most reactive sites on these nanostructured surfaces for CaP adsorption were the nanotube edges where the CaP deposits mostly growth. Due its positive bioactive properties in inducing bone formation on Ti alloys implants, partial substitution of Ca2+ by Sr2+ was studied. Results obtained by X-Ray Photoemission Spectroscopy (XPS) and Infrared Spectroscopy (IR) in reflection-absorption mode revealed that for pure CaP coating, the deposited CaP phase was amorphous apatitelike compound (ACP). In the case of Sr2+ doped CaP, we observed the formation of a more ordered Ca1-xSrxHPO4 compound similar to Dicalcium Phosphate Anhydrous (DCPA; CaHPO4) or Dicalcium phosphate dihydrate (DCPD; CaHPO4.2H2O) which is more resorbable than ACP or hydroxyapatite (HAP). BSA adsorption on these functionalized surfaces has been realized at neutral, acidic and basic pH values. Kinetic and conformational analyses have been done using IR spectroscopy and revealed a remarkable influence of surface functionalization on the protein conformation during the adsorption process.
An Evaluation of the Pulmonary Function Tests and their Association with Age and Body Mass Index (BMI) in the Southern Angami Population

Among the many variables in the human body form and function, pulmonary function is a major biological variable affected by gender, age, body composition, as well as the geographical location of a population. Pulmonary function tests (PFTs) are an essential tool for monitoring patients with known respiratory disease or for determining cases of pulmonary disorders, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD), obstructive lung diseases, etc. Women are found to have a lower lung capacity than men. This paper evaluates the differences in the PFTs between the males and the females, and various age groups. Additionally, an evaluation between age and body mass index (BMI) with pulmonary function tests is also made to find out if there are any significant relationships.