Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In fl uence of Nb content on martensitic transformation and mechanical properties of TiNiCuNb shape memory alloys

In present work, microstructure, martensitic transformation behavior and mechanical properties of (Ti50Ni40Cu10)100 xNbx (x 1⁄4 0, 5, 10, 15 at.%) alloys were investigated as a function of Nb content. The addition of Nb to TiNiCu alloy leads to the presence of b-Nb phase. During cooling and heating, the alloys show one-step B2 4 B19 transformation. As the Nb content increases, the transformation temperatures almost linearly decrease and the transformation hysteresis monotonously increases due to the decrease of middle eigenvalue of the phase transformation matrix. The addition of Nb is effective in improving the elongation because of the introduction of b-Nb phase. With the increase of Nb content, both the yield strength and the critical stress to induce martensitic transformation increase, resulting in the improved superelastic strain. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
ISSUES AND CHALLENGES OF WAQF INSTRUMENT : A CASE STUDY IN MAIS

Waqf is an important component of the Islamic economic instruments which is firmly believed, can solve the socio-economic problem mainly in the good attempt to eradicate poverty due to scarcity of income and employment. Although Waqf had been implemented in Malaysia for many years, it has yet give impact in contributing welfare of the people in this present day. Majlis Agama Islam Selangor (MAIS) is one of the religious institutions in this country that play a significant role in developing and managing Muslims Waqf in the state of Selangor. Lack of awareness, not getting enough funds beside others several challenges in Waqf will be discussed in this paper. Thus, this study attempts to discuss issues and challenges facing by MAIS during the implementation. Therefore this paper will propose action plan that should be taken by MAIS to improve effectiveness and efficiency of Waqf. In addition, the paper will identify the significance impact of Waqf implementation in MAIS towards generating economic growth to the state of Selangor.
THE INFLUENCE OF WATER LEVEL ON THE DETECTION OF SIGNS OF NEOTROPICAL OTTERS ( Lontra longicaudis ) ON A FLOOD PLAIN

The aim of this study was to characterize the habitat used by the Neotropical Otter on a section of the floodplain, and to examine the influence of river level on the detection of scent marking, defined as spraint and/or anal mucus. Over one year, a section of 6 km of the left bank of the Paraná River was searched for scent marking. Those sites were classified by the type of substrate and frequency of use. A linear regression analysis was applied between river level and the number of marking sites found. Most of the positive sites have rocky substrate, followed by sandy. Just over half of the marking sites were only used occasionally, and few sites were associated with high activity. The abundance of rocky substrate when river level is low is probably responsible for the high frequency of otter sign detected. We suggest that studies on Lontra longicaudis marking in a floodplain should be carried out during periods of lower river level to facilitate the finding of otter sign. We emphasize that estimates of density and habitat preference cannot be based solely on marking sites, because both this behaviour and its detection are subject to variations due to many factors, including the oscillation of the river level.
The Chiral Condensate of One-Flavor QCD and the Dirac Spectrum at ✓ = 0

In a sector of fixed topological charge, the chiral condensate has a discontinuity given by the Banks-Casher formula also in the case of one-flavor QCD. However, at fixed q -angle, the chiral condensate remains constant when the quark mass crosses zero. To reconcile these contradictory observations, we have evaluated the spectral density of one-flavor QCD at q = 0. For negative quark mass, it becomes a strongly oscillating function with a period that scales as the inverse space-time volume and an amplitude that increases exponentially with the space-time volume. As we have learned from QCD at nonzero chemical potential, if this is the case, an alternative to the Banks-Casher formula applies, and as we will demonstrate in this talk, for one-flavor QCD this results in a continuous chiral condensate. A special role is played by the topological zero modes which have to be taken into account exactly in order to get a finite chiral condensate in the thermodynamic limit.
Influence of Meta Learning the effectiveness of dialectical behavior therapy in reducing symptoms in patients with borderline personality disorder

This study was a quasi-experimental design and pretest-posttest control group. The population consisted of patients under treatment at a counseling center in Tehran. According to the inclusion criteria, 15 subjects were divided into three groups randomly. The first group was exposed to a dialectical behavior therapy, the second group, subject to the dialectical behavior therapy skills Meta Learning and third group, exposed as a control group. The Clinical Interview (SCID) DSM-IV used for diagnosis of Borderline personality disorder, also borderline personality disorder criteria, were used to assess symptoms. To analyze the data obtained is used for multivariate analysis of covariance. The results showed that dialectical behavior therapy reduced all symptoms except the feeling of emptiness and boredom. However, the "dialectical behavior therapy with learning to learn skills," with much greater effect, reduces all components. There were significant differences between the two mentioned treatments. "Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Meta Learning with" more of dialectical behavior therapy to reduced symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Based on the results we can say that metalearning can increase the efficacy of the dialectic.
The enhancement of prebiotic on probiotic for inhibiting growth of dental caries pathogen

Department of Restorative Dentistry, Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand 65000 Biodiversity Research Centre, Thailand Institute of Scientific and Technological Research, Pathum Thani, Thailand 12120 Corresponding author E-mail: wkornchanok@hotmail.com Abstract Dental caries is a major oral problem in almost all countries around the world. The local demineralization of tooth surface from an acid action is an initial step of disease. The acid is produced when sugar from food has an interaction with bacteria in dental plaque that usually accumulates on the susceptible tooth surface. As more acidic condition, some commensal oral bacteria are driven to become the cariogenic bacteria. Streptococcus mutans is a major contributor of dental decay. Many strategies are recommended to protect the susceptible teeth from cariogenic bacteria. A probiotic application is one technique providing the health-beneficial microorganism to inhibit the cariogenic bacteria. Prebiotics are oligosaccharides which can promote the growth of probiotics in human bowel. Objective: to evaluate the efficiency of the prebiotic (Galacto-oligosaccharides, (GOS)) to enhance the probiotic (Lactobacillus acidophilus) for inhibition of S. mutans. Methods: S. mutans and L. acidophilus were co-cultured with ratio of 1:20 in the de Man, Rogosa and Sharpe (MRS) media supplemented with different concentrations of GOS at 1, 2 and 3% (v/v). The efficiency of probiotic against S. mutans was determined by colony count at 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24 hrs and growth rate interpretation. Results: the growth rate of S. mutans increased when co-cultured in 1 and 2% (v/v) of GOS (0.6885 and 0.6142 hr, respectively). Then the growth rate of S. mutans (0.0109 hr) significantly decreased in 3% (v/v) of GOS. The growth rate of L. acidophilus in the co-culture was constant compared between 2 and 3% (v/v) of GOS (0.4347 and 0.4282 hr). Conclusion: the 3% of GOS provided a promised efficiency to inhibit the growth of S. mutans while it did not effect on the growth of L. acidophilus.
HUMOUR, IRONY AND SATIRE IN LITERATURE

Humour, irony and satire are technically distinct elements of literature. They have different origins. They are used in different ways with different purposes. The literary works have different modes. Each of them evokes different kind of fun and sense of pleasure. Each of them has generated new kinds of genres. However, they have some interrelations and people often mention them as synonyms. The present article researches these differences and similarities and make inferences to bring up some conclusions.
GROWTH AND YIELD PERFORMANCE OF COWPEA (Vigna unguiculata) (L.) WALP. POLLUTED WITH SPENT LUBRICATING OIL

The contamination of soil by used lubricating oil is rapidly increasing due to global increase in the usage of petroleum products. The effect of spent lubricating oil on the growth and yield response of cowpea Vigna unguiculata (L) Walp was investigated using potted plants in soil contaminated with different concentrations of spent lubricating oil. The 3kg of soil was mixed homogeneously with 50.0mL, 75.0mL and 100.0mL of spent lubricating oil and the control (0.0mL). The growth parameters shows that the application of spent lubricating oil had a significant reduction (p<0.05) on the plant height, leaf area, fresh weight, dry weight and the harvest index of the cowpea seedlings studied. The reductions and morphological effects in the growth characteristics measured shows that there was an increase as the concentration level of the contaminant increases compared to the control. The concentrations of copper, cadmium, iron, lead and nickel in soil contaminated with spent lubricating oil increased with the volume of treatment. Heavy metal concentrations in the shoot and root of treated plants were higher than that of the control. This could be responsible for the retarded growth of the plant, chlorosis of the leaves coupled with dehydration of the plant indicating water deficiency.
Factors Influencing Customer ’ s Behavioral Intention to Adopt Islamic Banking in Northern Nigeria : a Proposed Framework

Several factors have been suggested to explain factors that influence customer’s intention to adopt Islamic banking. To date, some of this factors that have been considered includes, credibility, confidentiality, quick service, religious, service quality, product, trust, among others. Despite these studies, however, few studies have attempted to consider the influence of behavioral intention and adoption of Islamic banking. Even if any, they have reported inconsistency findings. Therefore, a moderating variable is suggested. This paper proposes market maven as a potential moderator on the relationship between behavioral intentions and adoption of Islamic banking. Keyword: Behavioral intention, Attitude, Subjective norm, Market maven, Perceived Behavioral Control
Management Decision Board diversity and R & D investment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of board diversity on the extent to which firms invest in R&D. Design/methodology/approach – Based on data collected about the composition of the board of directors, the authors determine statistically if the characteristics of directors predicts the extent to which firms invest more in R&D. Findings – The authors find, unexpectedly, that tenure diversity lead firms to invest less in R&D, while education diversity and gender diversity makes firms invest more. Gender diversity positively moderates education diversity as well, strengthening the effect found. Research limitations/implications – The sample of firms the authors include in the paper is restricted due to the overwhelming difficulty in collecting data about the composition of boards of directors, and their backgrounds. Practical implications – The paper offers insights into how boards of directors might need to be composed in order to try have firms invest more in R&D. Social implications – Innovative firms are more competitive and more sustainable. Knowing what contributes to a firm’s investment in R&D is thus of great social value. Originality/value – The authors include a much larger set of diversity measures than any previously published study, and provide counter-intuitive findings that have implications for practice, society, as well as theory about team composition.
Assessment of micro and macro nutrients in poultry feeds available in Dhaka city, Bangladesh.

This study was based on to determine the concentration of macro and micro nutrients as well as toxic and nontoxic heavy metals present in the chicken feed available in Dhaka city of Bangladesh. All macro nutrients, if present in the feed at high concentration have some adverse effect, at the same time if this nutrient present in the feed at low concentration this have some adverse effect too. So that this nutrient level should be maintained at a marginal level. On the other side toxic heavy metals if present in the feed at very low concentration those can contaminate the total environment of the ecosystem. In this study six brand samples (starter, grower, finisher and layer) which was collected from different renowned chicken feed formulation industry in Bangladesh. Those samples were prepared for analysis by wet ashing and then metals were determined by Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy. It was found that 27.7 to 68.4, 57.3 to 121.9, 0.21 to 4.1, 0.32 to 2.1, 0.11 to 1.58, 0.28 to 2.11 and 0.28 to 1.78 for zinc, iron, copper, mercury, cadmium, nickel and cobalt respectively. It was found that essential macro and micro nutrients were present in the feed in low concentration on the other side mercury was present in high concentration in the feed samples.
Neuropsychology and neurophysiology of self-consciousness Multisensory and vestibular mechanisms

How do we become self-conscious or conscious of ourselves as the subject of experience? What are the brain structures involved in generating the experience of the conscious self? And are the underlying neurobiological processes different from those when we are conscious of other objects such as the oak tree standing in the garden? Despite recent neuroscientific efforts to study the neurobiological mechanisms of consciousness (such as the conscious perception of an oak tree; i.e. Laureys, 2005), self-consciousness has received much less attention and is deemed by many scientists as not yet approachable by empirical neuroscientific experimentation. Influential scholars such as William James (1890), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), and James Gibson (1950) as well as recent philosophers (Bermudez et al., 1995; Metzinger, 1993, 2003, 2005; Gallagher, 2000, 2005; Legrand, 2007) have proposed that the investigation of the psychological, physiological and neural mechanisms involved in bodily perception and bodily experience may be crucial for the understanding of self-consciousness. The present manuscript discusses several recent findings that seem to provide empirical evidence for the claim that crucial aspects of self-consciousness are linked to the bodily experiences of body ownership and self-location. Body ownership is defined by the immediate and continuous experience that our body and its parts belong to us, whereas self-location has been defined as the experience that the self is localized at the position of the body at a certain position in space. Psychologists and neuroscientists have started studying body ownership by examining self-attribution and self-location for isolated body parts of one’s own body (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998; Ehrsson et al., 2004) as well as one’s own entire body (Arzy et al., 2006a; Lenggenhager et al., 2007).
Birth and Growth Kinetics of Brome Mosaı¨c Virus Microcrystals

The early steps of crystal nucleation and growth in Brome Mosaı¨c virus and polyethylene glycol mixtures were analyzed using time-resolved x-ray scattering (at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble, France). The system was chosen as a crystallization model since the phase diagram of the macromolecule/polymer mixture was known to present, at high polymer concentration, a solid, precipitated phase made of the synchronized formation of a large number of microcrystals. The precipitation and crystallization of the samples was induced by the controlled mixing of virus and polymer using a stopped-ﬂow device. Appearance and growth of Bragg diffraction peaks were used to follow the crystal nucleation and growth as a function of time, virus and polymer concentration, and polymer size. In all samples, the crystallization starts after a few seconds and proceeds for ; 1–20 min until there is almost no virus left in the solution. The crystalline system was found to be face-centered cubic, with a unit cell size of 391 A˚. The data analysis allowed us to show the presence of viruses in only two states, in solution or in crystals, revealing that the formation of periodic order proceeds without any detectable intermediate amorphous state.
Bacterial vaginosis among pregnant women attending a primary health care center in Ile-Ife , Nigeria

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is one of the most prevalent vaginal infections among women in Africa. In pregnancy, certain complications such as preterm delivery, premature rupture of the membranes, and so on could ensue from BV. This study investigated the prevalence of BV among pregnant women attending antenatal clinic in a primary health care center at Enuwa, Ile-Ife, Nigeria and suggested possible interventions to avoid BV-associated complications in pregnancy. One-hundred and fifty high vaginal samples were collected from pregnant women having vaginal discharge and within the age range 20-40 years. The samples were collected and processed following Amsel criteria and Nugent criteria. Statistical analysis was based on simple percentages among related variables. Fifty pregnant women (33.3%) were identified for BV with Amsel criteria while ninety pregnant women (60%) were identified by Nugent criteria. Bacterial vaginosis was more prevalent among pregnant women in first trimester (36.7%), primigravidae (33.3%), and age group 20 to 25 years (38.9%). Consequently, high rate of BV among pregnant women attending PHC clinics demands adequate attention to prevent BV-associated complications in pregnancy and also reduce referrals that may ensue from such complications. Pregnant women attending antenatal clinic in various PHCs should be screened routinely for BV to avoid infection sequelae. Adequate laboratory facilities should be provided and laboratory personnel should be trained in the use of Nugent criteria for effective diagnosis of BV since the method is convenient and reliable. This will aid prompt and adequate diagnosis of BV in pregnancy. Effort should be made to discourage promiscuity among sexually-active age group and self-diagnosis/medication among pregnant women.
QoE aware HEVC based video communication

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), the latest and most popular video coding standard, has succeeded in significantly improving performance in terms of the compression efficiency by exploiting more and more spatial and temporal dependencies. Consequently, HEVC coded videos are much more susceptible to network impairments, which unless mitigated by some means, can have a significant detrimental impact on the end user’s perceived Quality of Experience (QoE). Furthermore, emerging HEVC based interactive video applications pose many challenges which cannot be resolved using traditional resource allocation algorithms or error resilience schemes. These include dynamic network conditions, the need for maintaining the QoE across a group of interacting users, strict delay constraints, as well as the geographic and temporal variations in the interactive content processing requirements, all of which must collectively determine and adapt the appropriate video coding parameters and network level resource allocation to enhance the overall QoE. To this end, this research proposes application layer and network layer methodologies to improve the end user QoE. First, an end user's video quality prediction model is proposed for HEVC based video communications under error prone channels. The model which incorporates the errors in the motion vectors, the reference pixels and the pixel clipping operations during the modelling phase, has subsequently demonstrated only a 3% prediction error whereas the state-of-the-art methods couldn't reach below 17.5% under identical conditions. Later, these distortion values are re-used inside the HEVC Rate-Distortion Optimization (RDO) process to realize a 20%-40% improvement in the BD-rate compared to the state-of-the-art error resilient schemes. Secondly, a novel motion vector estimation algorithm is proposed to select motion vectors which unlike the existing methods not only mitigate the error propagation from the previous frames but also improve the concealment accuracy of the future encoding frames. The proposed algorithm has consequently demonstrated 1.48 dB PSNR gain compared to the existing methods for the same bit rate. Finally a joint network and computational resource allocation scheme and an optimal transmission route selection algorithm is proposed to maximize the end user QoE of an interactive video application. The results demonstrates that the proposed resource allocation scheme can outperform the existing methods by a 50% margin in the serving probabilities and several orders of magnitude reduction in the computational times.
Facial microexpression recognition based on descriptor and classifier combinations = Reconhecimento de microexpressões faciais baseado em combinações de descritores e classificadores

Microexpression recognition in videos has important applications in psychotherapy, forensics, homeland security and negotiation, among others, for providing significant clues to hidden emotion detection. Since these expressions are very brief and difficult to be detected by the naked eye, automatic recognition is a natural step forward in the field. Researches on machine learning applied to their recognition are relatively new, however, initial results are promising, despite the challenges involved. Previous research works have mostly applied single descriptors and classifiers to recognize microexpressions. This work presents and evaluates a methodology that applies different descriptors as input to standalone classifiers. An extension to an existing facial geometric descriptor is also proposed and evaluated using different machine learning techniques, such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forests (RF) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classifiers. The output of standalone classifiers is combined through voting and stacking techniques. Results obtained on two public datasets indicate that significant improvement is achieved with the combined classification algorithms over the standalone classifiers, with final scores outperforming the state-of-the-art microexpression recognition methods with F1-score values of 68.66% and 64.18% for the CASME II and SMIC HS datasets, respectively.
Informing radiography curriculum development: The views of UK radiology service managers concerning the ‘fitness for purpose’ of recent diagnostic radiography graduates

Introduction : Recent years have seen significant changes in the way medical imaging services are delivered, rapid changes in technology and big increases in the number and ranges of examinations undertaken. Given these changes the study aimed to critically evaluate the fitness for purpose of newly qualified diagnostic radiography. Method : The study employed a grounded theory approach to analyse the interviews of 20 radiology managers from a range of medical imaging providers across the UK. Results : Four key themes emerged from the analysis. These were: curriculum content and structure review; diversification in the role of the radiographer; professionalism and coping and the reformation of career structures. Conclusion : The results indicate the role of the radiographer is now quite nebulous and challenge radiology managers and educators to design curricula and career structures which are better matched the role of the radiographer in the very rapidly changing technological, organisational and social contexts of modern society.