Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating the acceptance of environmental parking charging and congestion charging in urban centers in Greece

Transport charging policies consist a basic tool for sustainable mobility while they increasingly applied in urban centers. The objective of the paper is to investigate drivers’ acceptance of an environmental parking charging policy and an environmental congestion charging policy in Greek urban centers. For this purpose, data collected through a questionnaire survey while two ordinal logistic regression models developed to determine the public acceptance of the environmental transport charging policies under consideration; 370 responses were collected and analyzed. Results indicated that Greek drivers who are more environmentally conscious, accept other similar environmental charging policies and with high annual income have increased probability to accept the examined policies. Furthermore, several other parameters such as the driver’s satisfaction level considering travel cost and Public Transport accessibility, the weekly trips for work and age affect policies acceptance and should be taken into account by policymakers when developing and implementing similar environmental mobility strategies.
Study of federated learning in industrial IoT

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is actually a subset of IoT. Therefore, the growing development of IoT technology in recent years and its application in the industry have improved the performance of various industries. Certainly, the extensive usage of IoT in industrial is led to producing a huge amount of data that require a server for processing. while sending this amount of data causes several issues such as data centralization and privacy-preserving. Federated learning (FL) is an exhaustive solution to overcome these problems. Given that federated learning technology implemented in IIoT keep the data on the device as result, it helps the data security and optimizes the communication cost. In this article, we present a study of FL in IIoT.
Up Regulated miR-224-5p Can Target the Expression of Neuritin in Hearing Loss

Yin Song Jiaxing Center for Disease Control and Prevention Xue Zhang Tongxiang Center for Disease Control and Prevention Jiawei Sun Shihezi University School of Medicine Lina Li Jiaxing Center for Disease Control and Prevention Xiaofei Zhang Jiaxing Center for Disease Control and Prevention Ping Li Jiaxing Center for Disease Control and Prevention Jin Huang (  bio-huangjin@shzu.edu.cn ) Shihezi University School of Medicine Yan Yong Jiaxing Center for Disease Control and Prevention
HIV-CAUSAL The effect of efavirenz versus nevirapine-containing regimens

A number of strategies have aimed to assist countries in procuring antiretroviral therapy 4 (ARV) at lower prices. In 2009, as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria 5 (GFATM) commenced a voluntary pooled procurement scheme however, the impact of the 6 scheme on ARV prices remains uncertain. This study aims to estimate the effect of VPP on 7 drug prices using Efavirenz as a case study. This analysis uses WHO Global price report mechanism (GPRM) data from 2004 to 2013. Due to the highly skewed distribution of drug Prices, a generalized linear model (GLM) was 12 used to conduct a difference-in-difference estimation of drug price changes over time. These analyses found that voluntary pooled procurement reduced both the ex-works price 16 of generic Efavirenz and the incoterms price by 16.2% and 19.1%, respectively (P<0.001) in 17 both cases). The year dummies were also statistically significant from 2006 to 2013 18 (P<0.001), indicating a strong decreasing trend in the price of Efavirenz over that period.
State-owned banks and credit allocation in India: Evidence from an asset quality review

The main objective of the working paper series of the IIMA is to help faculty members, research staff and doctoral students to speedily share their research findings with professional colleagues and test their research findings at the pre-publication stage. IIMA is committed to maintain academic freedom. The opinion(s), view(s) and conclusion(s) expressed in the working paper are those of the authors and not that of IIMA. Abstract This paper examines the role of state-owned banks’ presence in allocation of credit to different sectors in India using the central bank’s Asset Quality Review (AQR) as a quasi-natural experiment. The AQR resulted in a larger increase in non-performing loans of state-owned banks as compared to other banks. We exploit the heterogeneity in the presence of state-owned and other banks across districts to identify the supply side channels for bank credit reallocation. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that the top-third of districts based on presence of state-owned banks’ branches experienced a higher fall in the share of credit to the industrial sector in the post-AQR period compared to other districts. Such districts also experienced a greater increase in retail loans, which are considered less risky compared to industrial loans. Further, an analysis using a panel vector autoregression finds that the AQR, through an increase in non-performing loans of state-owned banks, led to a decrease in economic growth at the district-level. The results of this study suggest that central bank policy reforms can influence bank credit allocation at the sub national level and have real economy effects. constant rupees) reduced in the districts with high state-owned bank presence post-AQR as compared to other districts. Further, the study analyses the real economy effects of the AQR using Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR). The findings confirm the reallocation of credit post-AQR and a negative effect on the district real GVA growth rate. The observed shift in the banks’ lending portfolio from industry credit to household credit and the established higher riskiness of loans to industries, contribute to the understanding of banks’ lending behaviour in case of higher NPAs. Overall, the results of this study suggest that central bank policy reforms do influence bank credit allocation at the sub national level and have strong real economy effects. Our study has implications on the effectiveness and consequences of banking policy reforms adopted by the central banks and other governing bodies.
IGHEM Evaluation of the benefits of turbine refurbishment by means of Index Test Method Reliability of results and Problems in Applications

The Index Test procedure is still widely used to have a comparative estimation of the turbine efficiency especially when it is necessary to check the benefits due to the refurbishment of the unit. Even if new techniques with computerised data acquisition systems are becoming more easy and rapid than they were in the past, Index Testing still remains the most easy way to obtain reliable information of the performances in big low head units and in all those small hydroelectric power plants where a complete efficiency measurement is too expensive. After a brief description of the different procedures and relevant theories related to the application of this method, some experimental tests are presented. The description of the obtained results is used to report some general evaluations and to focus the attention on some of the most common problems that could arise.
Swine as an Animal Model

Of the large animal species used for biomedical research, swine is easily the most popular. There are hundreds of breeds available worldwide, some of which are classified as miniature swine and commonly known as minipigs. Swine reach sexual maturity early, breed year-round, and deliver as many as 10 to 12 piglets in a single litter. Swine are large enough and robust enough to tolerate complex experimental protocols over an extended period of time that require multiple interventions, repeated tissue or fluid sampling, and imaging using technologies standard to hospitals. There is broad availability of a range of established cell lines derived from a variety of swine tissues and the offering of swine-specific reagents is expanding. Preliminary data from the swine genome project confirms the phylogenetic status of swine as closer to humans than rodent species, lending further weight to the selection of swine as a model for biomedical research. Further, swine genomics and proteomics are more advanced than nearly every other large animal model. [1-3]
Symmetrical Pt(100) Nanoalloy Electrocatalysts for Ammonia Oxidation

: Novel Pt(100)Pd, Pt(100)Au and Pt(100)PdAu nanoalloys were synthesised and tested for ammonia oxidation, which is a structure sensitive reaction that occurs almost exclusively on Pt(100) sites. High resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) analysis showed well distributed non-agglomerated 5-20 nm semi-spherical and cubic nanoalloys with lattice fridges on their surfaces indicating the crystalline nature of the nanoalloys. The existence of the preferentially cubic shaped nanoalloys in the samples revealed that the nanoalloys had a significant amount of (100) sites at their surfaces. The cyclic voltammetry (CV) of the Pt(100) nanoparticles in the hydrogen adsorption/desorption region (-200 mV to 100 mV vs. Ag/AgCl) showed the presence of adsorption states associated with (110) sites, (100) domains and (100) sites at -131 mV, -34 mV and 29 mV, respectively. The absence of the peak observed at 29 mV in the Pt(100) nanoalloy systems confirmed the formation of the bimetallic and ternary nanoparticles. The electrochemical activity of these nanoparticles for ammonia oxidation in basic medium showed increased current densities compared to the Pt electrode.
INTEGRATING LEAN, GREEN AND AGILE CONCEPTS IN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT - A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

: Over the past few years, organizations have been conducted to implement new patterns by introducing novel material and communication networks and developing more efficient product flows due to market pressures. Supply chains are viewed as a means to succeed in this field, as they may help to implement new management patterns. Three concepts, namely lean, green, and agile, deserve to be seriously addressed due to their significant importance in enhancing the supply chain performance. Nevertheless, conciliating the agile and lean principles for decreasing the environmental impacts is a comparatively new topic that is not clearly and structurally defined. The present paper aims to find new research routes and discover gaps in the literature through a systematic literature review with regard to lean, green and agile paradigms. This work is an attempt to summarize the state-of-art researches on the lean, green, and agile concepts in supply chain management and to try to find the way they are linked to each other.
The intrinsic geometry of the osculating structures that underlie the Heisenberg calculus (or Why the tangent space in sub-Riemannian geometry is a group)

We explore the geometry that underlies the osculating nilpotent group structures of the Heisenberg calculus. For a smooth manifold $M$ with a distribution $H\subseteq TM$ analysts use explicit (and rather complicated) coordinate formulas to define the nilpotent groups that are central to the calculus. Our aim in this paper is to provide insight in the intrinsic geometry that underlies these coordinate formulas. First, we introduce `parabolic arrows' as a generalization of tangent vectors. The definition of parabolic arrows involves a mix of first and second order derivatives. Parabolic arrows can be composed, and the group of parabolic arrows can be identified with the nilpotent groups of the (generalized) Heisenberg calculus. Secondly, we formulate a notion of exponential map for the fiber bundle of parabolic arrows, and show how it explains the coordinate formulas of osculating structures found in the literature on the Heisenberg calculus. The result is a conceptual simplification and unification of the treatment of the Heisenberg calculus.
A Comparison between the Kinematic Effects of Knee Orthosis and Ankle-Foot Orthosis in Knee Varus Alignment

This study aimed to compare the effects of a knee brace and ankle-foot orthosis on knee osteoarthritis. The study included 13 adult subjects with a knee varus exceeding 50 mm between the medial epicondyles of the femurs. Each subject participated in 3 walking conditions. In this study, only the knee orthosis reduced knee varus angle in patients with knee osteoarthritis. Therefore, we expect that newly applied ankle-foot orthosis will increase the diversity of conservative treatments for knee osteoarthritis, along with typically used conventional knee orthosis.
On-Demand State Separation for Cloud Data Warehousing

Moving data analysis and processing to the cloud is no longer reserved for a few companies with petabytes of data. Instead, the flexibility of on-demand resources is attracting an increasing number of customers with small to medium-sized workloads. These workloads do not occupy entire clusters but can run on single worker machines. However, picking the right worker for the job is challenging. Abstracting from worker machines, e.g., using stateless architectures, introduces overheads impacting performance. Solutions without stateless architectures resort to query restarts in the event of an adverse worker matching, wasting already achieved progress. In this paper, we propose migrating queries between workers by introducing on-demand state separation. Using state separation only when required enables maximum flexibility and performance while keeping already achieved progress. To derive the requirements for state separation, we first analyze the query state of medium-sized workloads on the example of TPC-DS SF100. Using this, we analyze the cost and describe the constraints necessary for state separation on such a workload. Furthermore, we describe the design and implementation of on-demand state separation in a compiling database system. Finally, using this implementation, we show the feasibility of our approach on TPC-DS and give a detailed analysis of the cost of query migration and state separation.
Riker: Always-Correct and Fast Incremental Builds from Simple Specifications

Build systems are responsible for building software correctly and quickly. Unfortunately, traditional build tools like make are correct and fast only when developers precisely enumerate dependencies for every incremental build step. Forward build systems improve correctness over traditional build tools by discovering dependencies automatically, but existing forward build tools have two fundamental flaws. First, they are incorrect; existing forward build tools miss dependencies because their models of system state are incomplete. Second, they rely on users to manually specify incremental build steps, increasing the programmer burden for fast builds. This paper introduces R IKER , a forward build system that guarantees fast, correct builds. R IKER builds are easy to specify; in many cases a single command such as gcc *. c suffices. From these simple specifications, R IKER automatically discovers fast incremental rebuild opportunities. R IKER models the entire POSIX filesystem—not just files, but directories, pipes, and so on. This model guarantees that every dependency is checked on every build so every output is correct. We use R IKER to build 14 open source packages including LLVM and memcached. R IKER incurs a median overhead of 8.8% on the initial full build. On average, R IKER ’s incremental builds realize 94% of make ’s incremental speedup with no manual effort and no risk of errors .
The Analysis on Factors Influencing the Use of Mobile Payment System Among Generation Z in Indonesia

Since the use of Mobile Payment is increasing from the past few years, the issue of the factors that influence the use of Mobile Payments is not to be amiss. This study aims to determine the factors that significantly influence the users' usage of mobile payment instruments. The research was conducted by using an online survey questionnaire and distributed among the respected 414 respondents. The factors that were studied in this research are the influence of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, trust and perceived security towards the behavioral intention of mobile payment usage. This study uses the quantitative method with Generation Z as the unit of analysis while the targeted population would be the respondents from Bekasi city. Based on the research, two of the factors have a significant relationship towards the behavioral intention to use the mobile payment instrument. In addition, the most influential factor from the highest to lowest would be perceived security and social influence. In conclusion the perceived security variable is the most influential variable.
Adaptive Data Debiasing through Bounded Exploration and Fairness

Biases in existing datasets used to train algorithmic decision rules can raise ethical and economic concerns due to the resulting disparate treatment of different groups. We propose an algorithm for sequentially debiasing such datasets through adaptive and bounded exploration in a classification problem with costly and censored feedback. Exploration in this context means that at times, and to a judiciously-chosen extent, the decision maker deviates from its (current) loss-minimizing rule, and instead accepts some individuals that would otherwise be rejected, so as to reduce statistical data biases. Our proposed algorithm includes parameters that can be used to balance between the ultimate goal of removing data biases -- which will in turn lead to more accurate and fair decisions, and the exploration risks incurred to achieve this goal. We analytically show that such exploration can help debias data in certain distributions. We further investigate how fairness criteria can work in conjunction with our data debiasing algorithm. We illustrate the performance of our algorithm using experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets.
Influence of slag and fly ash as supplementary cementitious materials on properties of concrete

—This paper reports the influence of varying content of individual and combined content of fly ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) as CEM-II supplementary materials on the properties of fresh and hardened concrete. The study utilized control mix without any fly ash or GGBFS. Supplementary additions of 30% separate or combined replacements of FA and GGBFS cementitious materials for ordinary Portland cement. The concrete mix C 1 was blended cement of 0FA/30GGFBS (0% fly ash and 30% GGBFS), C 2 was 10FA/20GGFBS, C 3 was 15FA/15GGFBS, C 4 was 20FA/10GGFBS and C 5 was 30FA/0GGFBS. This study confirmed the potentials of fly ash and GGBFS as supplementary materials for CEM-II blended concrete both in the plastic and hardened states. The findings showed that the workability of the control and blended cement concrete fell within the recommended range for plain and reinforced concrete. The tensile strength capacity of the concrete was enhanced by the cementitious materials with increase in curing age by immersion in water. The 28th day tensile strengths of all blended cement concrete mixtures were higher than the control value. Concrete mix C 3 had the highest tensile strength, while C 5 had the lowest tensile strengths. The compressive strength of concrete specimens with respect to control mix value increased parabolically with the mix C 3 having the maximum value of 30.8% and 59.3% higher than the 7th and 28 th day control compressive strength values respectively. At 28th day, the order of increase in the compressive strength are C 3 > C 1 > C 2 > C 4 > C 5 which were 59.3%, 38.1%, 31.3%, 15.9% and 5.7% higher than the characteristic strength value of the control mix. Concrete mix C 3 has the greatest resistance to chloride attack with 20% strength above the control value, while C 1 (with 30% GGBFS) was the worst affected by chloride attack.
Conditional DCGAN For Anime Avatar Generation

—Synthesis of realistic images from text would be interesting and useful, but current algorithms are still far from this goal. However, in recent years generic and powerful recurrent neural network architectures have been developed to learn discriminative text feature representations. Meanwhile, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks have begun to generate highly compelling images of speciﬁc categories, such as faces, birds, and rooms. In this work, I develop a novel deep architecture to bridge these advances in text and image modeling. The end result is an off-the-shelf encoder that can produce highly generic sentence representations that are robust and perform well in practice. I demonstrate the capability of my model to generate anime image from text descriptions.
VALUE CREATION IN A ‘NON-PRODUCING’ ENTERPRISE By UYIOSA OMOREGIE

A widely-held proposition is that an enterprise does not create value until it commences production of goods or services for external customers for monetary profit. Another related proposition is that employees in a ‘non-producing’ enterprise, if remunerated, are paid 100 percent above the value of their labour – because the enterprise is not creating value. Counter arguments to these two propositions are presented. To provide justification and support for the counter arguments, the purpose of a firm or business enterprise is discussed and the nature of ‘value’ is elaborated with a critique of the dominant marginal productivity theory of value. An example of a non-producing enterprise: A liquefied natural gas (LNG) company at ‘pre-operation’ stage is presented. LNG companies often lock-in customers with 20-year contracts before commencing production – this is value creation. Value, it seems, is not in the eyes of every beholder but found in the eyes of the shareholders of an enterprise who can use key performance indictors (KPIs) and enterprise risk management (ERM) to track employees’ value creation throughout the life cycle of the enterprise.
DESIGN MANAGEMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Purpose . The need for socially responsible solutions has increased noticeably in recent years and Design Management (DM) as a tool to solve them is becoming even more complicated, requiring new competences. Currently DM has been changing its course to designing where the designing process is already used in management and this leads to application of Design Thinking methods that should take into consideration not only economic but also social, environmental and cultural aspects in order to create more socially responsible solutions. The aim of this research is to ascertain the meaning and characteristics of DM for promoting socially responsible solutions, to take a critical look at DM’s development in the context of social responsibility and to develop a new approach in DM that promotes socially responsible solutions. Main results and findings. Content analysis shows that among the many approaches and definitions of DM, none directly points to the role of DM in ensuring sustainability and social responsibility. There has been a conceptual transition to integrated conceptualization of DM, which allows the theoretical assumptions to move beyond traditional design practices and theories, and there is potential for new DM approaches that promote socially responsible solutions in a more focused manner. Key contributions . This study provides a deeper understanding of DM, ascertains its meaning and characteristics, and determines gaps between different DM approaches in the context of social responsibility. Based on the literature review, the authors propose a new conceptual framework of DM for promoting socially responsible solutions and make recommendations for further applications in creative industries. Social implications . This research and approach aim to solve social and environmental issues and improve quality of life by application of more advanced DM approaches.