Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Moisture dependent physical and mechanical properties of chickpea seeds

Abstract: The moisture-dependent physical properties are important in designing and fabricating equipment and structures for handling, transporting, processing and storage, and also for assessing quality. This study was carried out to determine the effect of moisture content on some physical and mechanical properties for two varieties of chickpea seeds (Giza 3, and Giza 195). Four levels of moisture content ranging from 11.6% d.b. (dry basis) to 25.4% d.b. were used. The average length, width, thickness, and geometric mean diameter ranged from (7.92±0.04) mm to (8.14±0.04) mm, (6.10±0.04) mm to (6.37± 0.04) mm, (6.43±0.04) mm to (6.84±0.04) mm and (6.77±0.07) mm to (7.08±0.07) mm, respectively. The average sphericity and roundness ranged from (85.53±0.19)% to (87.00±0.19)% and (93.70±0.35)% to (94.14±0.35)%, respectively. The average measured surface area, calculated surface area, and projected area ranged from (144.73±1.55) mm 2 to (158.78±1.55) mm 2 , (146.89±1.58) mm 2 to (159.78±1.58) mm 2 , and (46.53±0.50) mm 2 to (48.93±0.50) mm 2 , respectively. The average bulk density, true density, porosity and angle of repose ranged from (730.05±11.84) kg/m 3 to (694.17±11.84) kg/m 3 , (1 , 225.12± 19.51) kg/m 3 to (1 , 308.02±19.51) kg/m 3 , (44.13±0.49)% to (43.29±0.49)%, and (25.20±0.41) o (degrees) to (29.10±0.41) o (degrees), respectively and also increased linearly with an increase in moisture content. The average seed weight and thousand seeds weight ranged from (0.142±0.002) gm to (0.184±0.002) gm, and (177.38±2.17) gm to (194.75±2.17) gm, respectively. The average static coefficient of friction against wood, stainless steel, galvanized iron and iron surfaces and internal with the same seeds ranged from (0.430±0.016) to (0.460±0.016), (0.321±0.007) to (0.366±0.007), (0.327±0.004) to (0.371±0.004), (0.412±0.011) to (0.496±0.011) and (0.638±0.022) to (0.741±0.022), respectively. The average terminal velocity ranged from (5.18±0.34) m/s to (9.14±0.34) m/s. The average penetration depth at load 6kg and tools diameter 1 mm was determined as mechanical property, and generally increased in magnitude with an increase in moisture content. The physical properties were linearly dependent upon moisture content. Keywords: moisture , physical properties, mechanical properties , c hickpea DOI: 10.3965/j.issn. 1934-6344.2010. 0 4 . 0 70 -0 83 Citation: Ayman H. Amer Eissa, Mohamed M A, Moustafa H, Abdul Rahman O. Alghanna. Moisture dependent physical and mechanical properties of chickpea seeds . Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2010; 3( 4 ): 70
An Integrated Activity-Based Modelling Framework to Assess Vehicle Emissions: Approach and Application

Owing to the richer set of concepts which are involved in activity-based transportation models, the potential advantages of an activity-based approach for air quality purposes have been recognized for a long time. However, models that have been developed along these lines are still scarce. In this research the activity-based model ALBATROSS was used in combination with the emission model MIMOSA to assess the travelled distances and the mobile source emissions produced by passenger cars in the Netherlands. The fact that this approach is based on hourly travel and emission values, rather than on aggregated results or peak hour values, a common practice within other traditional models, is an important added value. The predicted values seem to correspond well with the reported values from the Dutch Scientific Statistical Agency. Predictions for travelled distances overestimated the reported values by approximately 8%. Predictions for emissions of nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and particular matter differed by 16%, 11%, 9%, and 3%, respectively, from the officially reported values. This paper is novel in the sense that it both reports on the applied methodology and presents the practical results from a case study of the activity-based emission modelling approach.
The National Examination of English in Lithuania: Searching for Evidence of CEFR Criterial Achievement Levels

Alignment of language tests with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is a com¬plex process. One of many steps in this process involves the analysis and benchmarking of learner per¬form-ances characteristic of one or another achievement level. It is the analysis of grammatical features of learner essays written during the national English examination in Lithuania that is at the focus of this article. The study aims to investigate to what extent a list of grammatical criterial features (GCFs), proposed by the English Pro¬file Programme (EPP) at the University of Cambridge (Hawkins and Filipovic, 2012), is applicable to Lithua¬nian learners. Bearing in mind the fact that the national examination of English in Lithuania is oriented towards levels B1 and B2, the purpose is to contribute to the empirical validation of the test by providing linguistic evi¬dence from the essays of successful candidates. As the analysis shows, the corpus of examination essays used in this study contains many A2 structures, half of B1 and about one third of B2 structures proposed by the EPP team. The article discusses a number of issues related to the criteriality of individual GCFs and the applicability of a general list of features to specific learner groups. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.sal. 0.25. 8579
Applying genetic algorithms to frequency assignment problems

This paper details the application of a parallel genetic algorithm to the air-ground-air frequency assignment problem. Preliminary results indicate that the technique is successful in finding acceptable assignments, satisfying over 90% of constraints, for realistically sized air- ground-air frequency assignment scenarios. Comparisons are made with a classical backtracking and forward checking heuristic algorithm which is shown to be inferior to the genetic algorithm in terms of the execution time required to find reasonable frequency assignments.
Twisted Eulenspiegel: An Educational Approach To Role Playing In The Narrative Contexts

The theoretical framework of this study combines the concepts of role playing, storytelling and perspective taking in the creation of an interactive virtual environment, in order to assess and train the ability of students in primary and secondary level to take the point of view of the characters of a narrative. In order to develop this sense of “role” in an interactive virtual environment, we relied on the Vladimir Propp's work on morphology of fairy tale. With regard to the identification of literary material, we have focused attention on the cycle of stories of Till Eulenspiegel. The research path provides a virtual reconstruction of the world of Till, through interactive 3D animation that represents the scenario of the tales: a medieval town in which we developed an objective view, a vision of the entire district in Third Person Camera, and a subjective view, in First Person Camera, centered on the point of view of the character. Students will, therefore, deconstruct and reconstruct the original story, basing on the answers which they give to Till Eulenspiegel, becoming in turn deuteragonists or antagonists, villains or donors, helpers or false heroes. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014. v5n20p1118
New Perspectives on the Technical Communication Internship: Professionalism in the Workplace

This article argues for developing linked courses in technical communication where the instructor facilitates a service-learning curriculum and then serves as faculty advisor within subsequent internships. In these linked courses, students write technical documents before moving into internships where they write similar documents. Specifically, the article examines the results from one such class and offers both theoretical and practical advice for collaborating with nonprofit and creating internships that are beneficial for both the students and the nonprofit. In addition, the discussion highlights students' preparedness to enter the field of technical communication, as evidenced through their internship work and their final reflections. Through careful consideration of the nonprofit' responses, I suggest making changes to professional and technical communication curricula for linked courses and internships, including the addition of an objective of professionalism that teaches students to not only write in a professional manner, but to also consider their actions and responsibilities within the context of an organizational culture.
Recurrent and feedforward backpropagation for time independent pattern recognition

Based on a unified description of neural algorithms for time-independent pattern recognition, the authors discuss the generalization ability of a three-layer perceptron for recurrent backpropagation depending on the number of learning epochs and the steepness of the neurons' threshold function. Moreover, the suitability of recurrent and feedforward backpropagation learning algorithms for implementation on multiprocessor systems is investigated. In contrast to the common belief that recurrent back-propagation is more computationally intensive than feedforward backpropagation, the present results for optical character recognition indicate that this need not be the case if the steepness of the threshold function is appropriately chosen. This makes recurrent backpropagation a suitable candidate for time-independent pattern recognition. <<ETX>>
Service quality at University of Tehran Central Library

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of service quality aspects from the perspective of University of Tehran Central Library users. It also aims to measure how successful the library has been in meeting users' needs by providing good and reliable services.Design/methodology/approach – The research was conducted among library users. In order to meet the objectives of the study, SERVPERF methodology was used. Information was gathered via questionnaires which consisted of structured questions. All the closed ended questions were designed to elicit responses on a five‐point Likert scale to measure both respondent satisfaction and perception of service quality.Findings – The results show that, although University of Tehran Central Library has conducted several programs for improving its services, because of the lack of identifying the most important aspects of service quality in their customers' ideas, the efforts for providing customer satisfaction has failed to a great extent.
Gesture-based interface reconfiguration

ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose a novel approach to build an intuitive, reconfigurable tangible interface. Our approach is based on a small set of simple gestures using a set of arbitrary physical objects, and their recognition by a table equipped with weight sensors. In our model, physical tokens or everyday items such as coffee mugs or mobile phones are associated to virtual controls of the user interface by means of two-dimensional gestures. The resulting relationship between physical and virtual entities is then used to control the application. As the user is able to dynamically change the associations, the interface can be easily reconfigured and thus personalised to individual users. Keywords Tangible user interfaces, interface reconfiguration, spatio-temporal reasoning, ubiquitous computing, weight sensors, tangible objects. 1. INTRODUCTION Semi-public displays such as TV screens in domestic environments increasingly evolve to central control centres for multimedia and home automation control. Several research projects currently investigate ways to facilitate user interaction with an increasingly complex set of (entertainment) devices (see, for example, [7]). In addition, a new generation of commercial products such as digital multimedia receivers or software such as Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center [9] is on the verge of entering the mass market, and will provide the infrastructure for new and interesting applications around the home. However, standard input devices such as keyboard and mouse are not well suited for this environment, since they clutter living room space and are awkward to use in settings such as the kitchen or a bedroom. Similarly, remote controls are neither appropriate as they are often badly designed, bound to a specific device, not customisable for individual users and tend to get lost. Tangible or graspable interfaces try to address this issue by designing new devices that seek to provide a more natural and intuitive way for application and device control. However, in a domestic setting they suffer from similar problems as traditional input devices such as remote controls: Dedicated control devices that have a fixed control functionality have to be present at the time and place a user wishes to interact with a system. This may seem obvious but if one considers a user moving around his house and interacting with various applications on his way, such devices would either have to be carried around or available at all locations. In order to address this problem, we present a system that relies on mobile everyday items and an augmented table to enable user interaction with arbitrary services. In section 2, we provide a short overview over related work and basic issues. Our approach to address these problems is the main topic of section 3, where we introduce a set of basic two-dimensional gestures as well as their mapping to interface actions. In section 4, we review two example applications before presenting an outlook on future research in section 5. Section 6 summarises the main contributions of this paper.
Strategies for Computer-Based Programming Instruction: Program Completion vs. Program Generation

Two instructional strategies were implemented in a two-and-a-half hour computer-based training program that was designed to teach elementary turtle graphics programming techniques to novice undergraduate students (N = 40). Learning activities that either emphasized the completion of existing programs or the generation of new programs were studied for the two strategies. In the completion group, the information needed to perform the program completion tasks appeared to be largely available in the to-be-completed programs; in the generation group, students frequently had to search for useful examples while they were performing their program generation tasks. It is hypothesized that during practice, the direct availability of examples in the form of incomplete computer programs facilitates the acquisition of programming language templates, especially because students cannot complete a program without carefully studying it so that “mindful abstraction” is explicitly provoked. Data in this study on learning outcomes support this hypothesis: the completion group showed a superior use of programming language templates in both a program construction test and a multiple choice test that measured the knowledge of language statements.
Student Engagement: Developing a Conceptual Framework and Survey Instrument

Student engagement is considered to be among the better predictors of learning, yet there is growing concern that there is no consensus on the conceptual foundation. The authors propose a conceptualization of student engagement grounded in A. W. Astin's (1984) Student Involvement Theory and W. A. Kahn's (1990) employee engagement research where student engagement is built on four components: emotional engagement, physical engagement, cognitive engagement in class, and cognitive engagement out of class. Using this framework the authors develop and psychometrically test a student engagement survey that can be used by researchers to advance engagement theory and by business schools to monitor continuous improvement.
Does Adding a Formal Leader Improve the Performance of a Team in a Business Simulation?

Game administrators must decide on team size and task assignments within teams. The research reported in this article addresses one key component of that decision; namely, should a formal leader be added to each group or should the group members be allowed to perform as peers. The authors held constant the differences across sections and across the subtasks that the individual group members performed. The authors found no evidence that groups with the added leader had better financial performance than groups without a formal leader.
Segmenting and profiling attendees of a film festival

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse film festival spectators on the basis of their motives for attending as well as other variables linked to cultural consumption, the evaluation of the event and certain sociodemographic characteristics of attendees. Design/methodology/approach – Survey data were collected at the Valdivia International Film Festival, the case study. In order to achieve the goals of the paper, a variety of statistical methods and techniques were used. First, principal component factorial analysis was applied to identify the underlying motivational dimensions. Second, the authors adopted cluster analysis based on the dimensions pinpointed in the factorial analysis in order to segment festival attendees. Finally, analysis of variance and χ2 analysis were applied to establish each group's profile. Findings – The empirical research reveals three motivation factors (discovery, entertainment and cinema) and three discrete groups of spectators, labelled as socially indifferent, film.
Power estimation for high level synthesis

Techniques for rapidly and accurately estimating power consumption based on high level descriptions of system architectures are described. This approach, based on stochastic modeling of bus statistics, achieves the accuracy traditionally associated with gate and circuit level estimation tools while exploiting the reduced computational complexity offered by the architectural level of abstraction. The results presented indicate an estimation accuracy within 9.4% of gate level simulations, while existing high level techniques can be off 80% or more. <<ETX>>
Price feedback and hybrid diffusions in finance

It is well-known that the probabilistic behaviour of financial asset returns is not captured well by the classical Black-Scholes model. The true behaviour will never be perfectly captured in any model, but insight is continually being obtained into our understanding of more sophisticated and realistic models. Much research has been published recently exploring the use of L\'{e}vy process models, which maintain the original \emph{independent stationary increments} assumption present in the Black-Scholes model, but incorporate jumps in the modelling. This investigation seeks to motivate a new class of models, throwing out the stationary increments hypothesis. We argue that certain techniques of trading decision-making are not independent of previous price movements, and the returns, being driven by the trade order flow, will reflect that. From here, we develop two particular such models, which are both diffusion models, and study them for their probabilistic behaviour. The first of these models is a hybrid of the arithmetic and geometric Brownian motions, which has transition probabilities expressible in terms of a spectral expansion involving Legendre functions. The second is a hybrid of the arithmetic Brownian motion and the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross process, and its spectral expansions involve the confluent hypergeometric functions. Having developed these expressions in sufficient detail to do so, we consider the calculation of value-at-risk and expected shortfall in these two models.
Training Transfer and Transfer Motivation: The Influence of Individual, Environmental, Situational, Training Design, and Affective Reaction Factors

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of individual, environmental, training design, and affective reaction factors on training transfer and transfer motivation. To determine the relationship between these factors and their influence on training transfer and to test the model, the researchers collected data from employees in the Malaysian banking sector. Structural equation modeling with Amos 16 was used to test the model and determine the relationship. The study suggested that training stakeholders should manage the training program effectively. Transfer is maximized when trainees have social support, high performance self-efficacy, and transfer motivation. Stakeholders (e.g., trainers, trainees, supervisors, and peers) are important to the training transfer process, as are learner readiness, trainee reaction, instrumentality, and training retention. This study revealed that perceived content validity and transfer design work together and influence the trainee's performance self-efficacy. In other words, if trainers want to improve the performance self-efficacy level of trainees, they need to explain how the trainee can transfer the learned skills at the workplace and make sure the content of the training is similar to the actual job. The main objective of training programs is to align the employee's expertise with organizational goals. Organizations can achieve their desired objectives only when employees transfer the learned skills on the job. Unfortunately, employees often transfer only a small percentage of skills they have learned in training. To effectively manage their training programs, organizations need to identify and focus on the factors that resist effective training transfer.
The restoration of pitch variation defects in gramophone recordings

A new algorithm is presented for the identification and restoration of time-varying pitch defects in audio signals. The problem is commonly encountered as 'wow' in gramophone disc and magnetic tape recordings where motor speed variations or eccentricity in the recording process are significant. The algorithm operates in two stages, the first of which trades tonal components in musical signals to generate a single pitch variation curve, and the second stage which performs restoration as a time-varying resampling operation. Results are presented from both artificially degraded sources and real sources. <<ETX>>
A Survey of Image Compression Algorithms for Visual Sensor Networks

With the advent of visual sensor networks (VSNs), energy-aware compression algorithms have gained wide attention. That is, new strategies and mechanisms for power-efficient image compression algorithms are developed, since the application of the conventional methods is not always energy beneficial. In this paper, we provide a survey of image compression algorithms for visual sensor networks, ranging from the conventional standards such as JPEG and JPEG2000 to a new compression method, for example, compressive sensing. We provide the advantages and shortcomings of the application of these algorithms in VSN, a literature review of their application in VSN, as well as an open research issue for each compression standard/method. Moreover, factors influencing the design of compression algorithms in the context of VSN are presented. We conclude by some guidelines which concern the design of a compression method for VSN.
Open access awareness, use, and perception: a case study of AAU faculty members

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a survey undertaken at Al Ain University of Science and Technology (AAU) to investigate and understand faculty awareness, use and perception of Open Access (OA) resources. Design/methodology/approach – Using a Web-based survey questionnaire, data were collected from full-time faculty members teaching at AAU, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Findings – The study found that faculty members possess a good knowledge and a positive perception of OA resources. They frequently use OA resources for teaching, learning and research activities. However, the findings indicate that female faculty members are more likely to use OA resources than male faculty members. Faculty members with a high level of awareness or use are found to have a highly positive perception of OA resources. Presenting research reports at conferences and seminars or publishing research papers is weakly associated with the level of awareness and use of OA resources. The study revealed n.