nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Location decision strategies for improving SMME business performance
Year: 2011

The primary objective of this study is to investigate the macro environmental factors that may influence location decisions and how these choices may affect the business performance of SMMEs.  SMMEs in South Africa play an increasingly important role in stimulating economic activity, growth and employment creation. However, many SMMEs cease to exist within the first five years of operation due to various challenges faced by SMMEs on a daily basis. Many SMMEs owners disregard the importance of location, yet the geographical location can negatively influence the survival of the business. Several factors influence the choice of the location, which will ultimately have either a positive or negative effect on business performance.  A positivistic research methodology was adopted for this study. Seven hypotheses were constructed to achieve the primary objective of this study. The population for this study consisted of SMMEs in the Nelson Mandela Metropole from which a convenience sample of 175 SMMEs was selected. The measuring instrument, a self developed questionnaire, consisted of three sections. The data collected included the demographical data of the respondents and their businesses, statements on location and various factors influencing location decisions as well as measurements of business performance. Cronbach Alpha coefficients were calculated to determine the reliability of the questionnaire items. Data analysis was done by calculating descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficients and conducting a simple linear regression analysis. Cohen's d was used to determine the significance of between factor differences.  The results of the study showed that positive relationships existed between all the independent variables (location, rental rates, employment, inflation, interest rates and green buildings) and the dependent variable (business performance) except for the relationship between electricity tariffs and business performance. Employment and business performance attained the strongest positive relationship; indicating that business owners regarded employment as an important factor to consider when searching for suitable business premises. The relationship between location and business performance obtained the lowest positive correlation. Originality and value of the research: Research on South African SMMEs regarding location decisions and the specific factors identified in this study has not been done previously in South Africa. Therefore, because evidence exists that the macro environmental factors influence location decisions to varying degrees, this study can provide SMME owners with insight into the factors influencing location choice. It is vital that business owners consider these factors as they could influence business performance, and ultimately, business survival. An increased awareness of the importance of the aspects discussed in this study could consequently lead to improved performance in the SMME sector.
Transformative service research and service design: synergistic effects in healthcare
Year: 2018

This conceptual paper answers the question: How do we design service experiences in whole to increase the well being of all participants in the healthcare system patients, families, and caregivers? In order to do so, we position service design as an essential tool and even a mindset needed for transformative service research success. We discuss the transformative role service design plays in improving service and consumer entities' well being with a focus on how this approach can lead to improved healthcare service outcomes. We also add to the conversation surrounding service and consumer entities' well being by broadening the concept and application of service design to consider social, existential, psychological, and physical well being. We particularly explore how healthcare services can benefit from further consumer engagement and collaborative patient provider relationships, two key factors essential for redesigning the industry.
Analysis of sub grid scale modeling of the ideal gas equation of state in hydrogen oxygen premixed flames
Year: 2019

In large eddy simulations (LES) of multicomponent and fully compressible flows, the spatially filtered pressure needs to be evaluated, i.e. the pressure averaged over a volume. The flow is non homogeneous within this volume and the state relationship linking pressure, density, temperature and species mass fractions should not be applied directly to their values resolved on the LES mesh. In practice, the unresolved correlations between density, species and temperature are usually neglected to compute the filtered pressure from the resolved fields. Analyzing one dimensional laminar and three dimensional turbulent H2/O2 space filtered flames under lean and stoichiometric conditions, it is observed that a large part of the error introduced by the linearization of the equation of state can be counterbalanced by expressing the mean molar weight of the mixture with the Reynolds filtered species mass fractions, instead of the density weighted (Favre) mass fractions. A sub grid scale closure for the remaining part of the unknown correlation is also proposed, which relies on a scale similarity assumption. Finally, an approximate deconvolution/filtering procedure is discussed to estimate the Reynolds filtered mass fractions from the density weighted mass fractions, which are the transported quantities in LES flow solvers.
Improved Tobit Kalman filtering for systems with random parameters via conditional expectation
Venue: Signal Process.
Year: 2018

This paper is concerned with the Tobit Kalman filtering problem for a class of linear discrete time system with random parameters. The elements of both the system matrix and the measurement matrix are allowed to be random variables in order to reflect the reality. The information matrix is employed to 1) derive the covariance between any two random variables; and 2) establish a novel weighting covariance formula to address the quadratic terms associated with the random matrices. A set of Bernoulli random variables is introduced to govern the censoring phenomenon on the measurement output. The conditional expectation, as a basic tool, is utilized to deal with the dependence among the random variables. Within the framework of the traditional Kalman filtering, the proposed filtering algorithm includes the information from both the random parameters and the censored measurements. A simulation example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and applicability of the designed algorithm.
Theta burst stimulation in humans: a need for better understanding effects of brain stimulation in health and disease
Venue: Experimental Brain Research
Year: 2020

Repetitive transcranial stimulation (rTMS) paradigms have been used to induce lasting changes in brain activity and excitability. Previous methods of stimulation were long, often ineffective and produced short lived and variable results. A new non invasive brain stimulation technique was developed in John Rothwell's laboratory in the early 2000s, which was named 'theta burst stimulation' (TBS) This used rTMS applied in burst patterns of newly acquired 50 Hz rTMS machines, which emulated long term potentiation/depression like effects in brain slices. This stimulation paradigm created long lasting changes in brain excitability, using efficient, very rapid stimulation, which would affect behaviour, with the aim to influence neurological diseases in humans. We describe the development of this technique, including findings and limitations identified since then. We discuss how pitfalls facing TBS reflect those involving both older and newer, non invasive stimulation techniques, with suggestions of how to overcome these, using personalised, 'closed loop' stimulation methods. The challenge in most non invasive stimulation techniques remains in identifying their exact mechanisms of action in the context of neurological disease models. The development of TBS provides the backdrop for describing John's contribution to the field, inspiring our own scientific endeavour thanks to his unconditional support, and unfailing kindness.
ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM
Year: 2019

This research investigates racial discrimination in the labour market. Specifically, the difference in wage between white and black football players in the Italian Serie A. The expectation is that white players make more money than their black peers, while their performance characteristics are the same. This is tested with a dataset containing 469 players in a period from 2010 to 2015. In total there are 1585 observations. This data comes from different websites containing information about football players, like their age and different performance characteristics (goals scored and assists) From the ordinary least squared regressions with fixed effects and multiple matching methods follows that it is likely that black players earn less money, but the difference is not significantly different from zero. In conclusion, there is no hard evidence for wage discrimination in the Italian Serie A but there is a possibility that players get discriminated against in other parts of the labour market than the wage. This is in line with research in different football competitions. The views stated in this thesis are those of the author and not necessarily those of Erasmus School of Economics or Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Influenza del trattamento di kolsterizzazione sulla resistenza a corrosione dell'acciaio inossidabile AISI 204Cu
Year: 2016

I trattamenti termochimici per incrementare la durezza superficiale degli acciai come cementazione e nitrurazione sono stati largamente studiati in passato; questi trattamenti portano ad ottenere una durezza superficiale che raggiunge anche i 1200 HV. Tuttavia, considerando gli acciai inossidabili austenitici (alti tenori di Cr e Ni) i trattamenti termochimici, se effettuati a temperature superiori ai 500degC, provocano la precipitazione di carburi o nitruri di cromo i quali, impoverendo la matrice nell'elemento che conferisce l'inossidabilita, riducono le proprieta anti corrosive dei suddetti acciai. Negli ultimi tempi si sta diffondendo un nuovo tipo di trattamento termochimico chiamato Kolsterizzazione, che puo definirsi una cementazione in bassa temperatura 470degC) Questo trattamento permette anch'esso l'arricchimento superficiale di C, tuttavia, essendo effettuato a temperature minori della classica cementazione, evita la precipitazione dei carburi di Cr che comprometterebbero la resistenza alla corrosione degli acciai austenitici. Il presente lavoro ha inteso studiare le possibili modifiche superficiali indotte dal trattamento di Kolsterizzazione e il loro effetto sulla resistenza a corrosione di un particolare tipo di acciaio inossidabile austenitico al Cr Mn, l' AISI 204Cu, introdotto nel 2001 come possibile sostituto dell'acciaio AISI 304. Il trattamento termochimico provoca la precipitazione di due differenti tipologie di carburi: Fe2,5C (carburo di Hagg) e Fe2C. La loro presenza, tuttavia, non sembra incidere cosi negativamente sul comportamento a corrosione dell'acciaio kolsterizzato che risulta superiore a quella del materiale base.
Silicon containing inherent flame retardant polyamide 6 with anti dripping via introducing ethylene glycol as the chain linker and charring agent
Year: 2020

An inherent flame retardant PA6 (FR PA6) containing polydiphenylsiloxane (PDPS) was synthesized under the action of ethylene glycol (EG) via a facile "2 step" bulk polymerization. Inspiringly, EG acted not only as a 'chain linker' to connect PA6 oligomer with PDPS moiety but also as a charring agent to increase the charring capacity of FR PA6 after combustion. The prepared FR PA6 reached 28.3% of limiting oxygen index (LOI) and passed the V 0 level of UL94 test with suppressed melt dripping. After investigating the char residues and pyrolysis volatiles of FR PA6 after combustion, the formation of silicon rich protective layer was proved to be the essential factor to increase the flame retardancy of FR PA6 via reducing the diffusion of pyrolysis volatiles, restricting the heat transfer and mass loss as well as preventing polymer melts from dripping. This work thus makes a worthwhile contribution to the development of FR PA6 by offering a novel route that is easily accessible to industrial fabrication.
Clinical features of pediatric patients with COVID 19: a report of two family cluster cases
Venue: World Journal of Pediatrics
Year: 2020

Coronovirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) has spread rapidly across the globe. People of all ages are susceptible to COVID 19. However, literature reports on pediatric patients are limited.  To improve the recognition of COVID 19 infection in children, we retrospectively reviewed two confirmed pediatric cases from two family clusters. Both clinical features and laboratory examination results of the children and their family members were described.  The two confirmed children only presented with mild respiratory or gastrointestinal symptoms. Both of them had normal chest CT images. After general and symptomatic treatments, both children recovered quickly. Both families had travel histories to Hubei Province.  Pediatric patients with COVID 19 are mostly owing to family cluster or with a close contact history. Infected children have relatively milder clinical symptoms than infected adults. We should attach importance to early recognition, early diagnosis, and early treatment of infected children.
Towards High Performance Object Detection: Task Specific Design Considering Classification and Localization Separation
Venue: ICASSP 2020 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Year: 2020

Object detection performs two tasks (classification and localization) simultaneously. Two tasks share a similarity: they need robust features that effectively represent the visual appearance of the objects. However, two tasks also have different properties. First, classification mainly requires features from discriminative parts of an object to determine the object category, whereas localization mainly requires features from the entire object regions for localizing by drawing a bounding box. Second, classification has a translation invariant property, whereas localization has a translation variant property. In order to increase the efficiency of object detection, it is necessary to design a network in consideration of the commonalities and differences of two tasks. In this work, we simply modified layers of the existing object detection networks into three parts by considering such characteristics: lower layer feature sharing part, layer separation part, and feature fusion part. As a result, the performance of the proposed method was noticeably improved by properly sharing, separating, and fusing layers of the existing object detection networks.
Associating Natural Language Comment and Source Code Entities
Venue: AAAI
Year: 2020

Comments are an integral part of software development; they are natural language descriptions associated with source code elements. Understanding explicit associations can be useful in improving code comprehensibility and maintaining the consistency between code and comments. As an initial step towards this larger goal, we address the task of associating entities in Javadoc comments with elements in Java source code. We propose an approach for automatically extracting supervised data using revision histories of open source projects and present a manually annotated evaluation dataset for this task. We develop a binary classifier and a sequence labeling model by crafting a rich feature set which encompasses various aspects of code, comments, and the relationships between them. Experiments show that our systems outperform several baselines learning from the proposed supervision.
Emission characteristic of polychlorinated dibenzo p dioxins and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs) from medical waste incinerators (MWIs) in China in 2016: A comparison between higher emission levels of MWIs and lower emission levels of MWIs.
Venue: Environmental pollution
Year: 2017

Emission characteristic of polychlorinated dibenzo p dioxins and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs) from 12 medical waste incinerators (MWIs) which have a total yearly capacity of 523 440 ton medical waste and accounted for 8.1% of total yearly capacity of 246 MWIs in China were studied. The congeners profile, emissions and toxic equivalent concentrations (TEQ) indicators of PCDD/Fs in stack gas from two groups of MWIs were researched, and the possible formation mechanisms of PCDD/Fs from MWIs were preliminarily discussed. The results of present study were summarized as follows. (1) The total concentrations and TEQ of PCDD/Fs in stack gas from MWIs were 0.516 122.803 ng Nm 3 and 0.031 3.463 ng I TEQ Nm 3, respectively. (2) 1,2,3,4,6,7,8 H7CDF, O8CDD, O8CDF and 1,2,3,4,6,7,8 H7CDD were the indicatory PCDD/Fs of MWI source, which could be used to apportion the sources of PCDD/Fs in environmental medium in China. (3) The emission factors of PCDD/Fs from MWIs ranged from 32.7 to 4900.0 ng I TEQ ton 1 with a mean of 1923.6 ng I TEQ ton 1. (4) The gas emissions of PCDD/Fs from researched 12 MWIs and all of MWIs in China in 2016 were 37.742 and 465.951 mg I TEQ year 1, respectively. (5) 1,2,3,7,8,9 H6CDF and 1,2,3,4,7,8 H6CDF were effective TEQ indicators for the real time monitoring of the PCDD/Fs emission. (6) The congeners profile and factor composition of PCDD/Fs in stack gas from two groups of MWIs were researched based on positive matrix factorization (PMF) model, and the possible formation mechanisms of PCDD/Fs from MWIs were preliminarily discussed.
Counteracting Strategic Purchase Deferrals: The Impact of Online Retailers' Return Policy Decisions
Year: 2016

Online shoppers value lenient return policies as they are unable to assess whether products match their expectations. We study how consumers' discount seeking purchase deferrals affect online retailers' return policy choices. Lenient returns may induce higher full price sales by limiting consumer regret, while signaling clearance unavailability risk. Contrasting earlier research that concluded a monopolist must set the refund at the clearance price when strategic consumers were overlooked, we find that an optimal refund bounded by the clearance price can mitigate purchase deferrals only when a monopolist salvages at mild discounts. To explore conditions under which a monopolist permits "full refund returns," we consider three scenarios: we permit clearing inventory without a loss; we assume lenient returns stimulate aggregate demand; we consider consumers' transaction costs. We also derive a unique rational expectations equilibrium for competing retailers, wherein each retailer's equilibrium refund is nondecreasing in its clearance price. Furthermore, retailers with clearance prices below a threshold should not allow returns, and those who do, higher clearance revenues imply higher full prices, higher quantities, and higher profits. We conclude that a credible clearance partner salvaging at higher prices than those at competing clearance mediums helps retailers gain competitive advantage when selling to strategic consumers.
A Review of the Literature on the Integration of Technology into the Learning and Teaching of English Language Skills
Year: 2017

Technologies have dramatically changed the way people gather information, carry out research, and communicate with others worldwide. Technology has removed the distance obstacles and has made it possible for higher education to effectively teach anyone. Technology integration is being increasingly used in instruction to improve teaching and learning. This rapid development of technology integration has presented a better pattern to find the new teaching models. Consequently, it has a key role in learning and teaching language skills. The integration of technology to create a context to teach and learn English skills has a lot of advantages. The fundamental aim of this paper is to review the issues related to technology integration in the learning and teaching of language skills. In this paper, the researcher defines the term technology integration, expresses the reason of integrating technology, explains the role of technologies in promoting learning, elaborates teachers' roles and learners' roles, reviews previous studies on the benefits of technology in the learning and teaching of language skills, indicates the situation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Iran, and finally mentions the recommendations for the successful integration of technology. The review of literature revealed that the integration of technology into the classrooms considerably improves the learning and teaching of English language skills.
Meta Learning via Learned Loss
Venue: 2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)
Year: 2021

Typically, loss functions, regularization mechanisms and other important aspects of training parametric models are chosen heuristically from a limited set of options. In this paper, we take the first step towards automating this process, with the view of producing models which train faster and more robustly. Concretely, we present a meta learning method for learning parametric loss functions that can generalize across different tasks and model architectures. We develop a pipeline for "meta training" such loss functions, targeted at maximizing the performance of the model trained under them. The loss landscape produced by our learned losses significantly improves upon the original task specific losses in both supervised and reinforcement learning tasks. Furthermore, we show that our meta learning framework is flexible enough to incorporate additional information at meta train time. This information shapes the learned loss function such that the environment does not need to provide this information during meta test time. We make our code available at https:/sites.google.com/view/mlthree
How interpersonal synchrony facilitates early prosocial behavior.
Venue: Current opinion in psychology
Year: 2018

When infants and children affiliate with others, certain cues may direct their social efforts to 'better' social partners. Interpersonal synchrony, or when two or more people move together in time, can be one such cue. In adults, experiencing interpersonal synchrony encourages affiliative behaviors. Recent studies have found that these effects also influence early prosociality for example, 14 month olds help a synchronous partner more than an asynchronous partner. These effects on helping are specifically directed to the synchronous movement partner and members of that person's social group. In older children, the prosocial effects of interpersonal synchrony may even cross group divides. How synchrony and other cues for group membership influence early prosociality is a promising avenue for future research.