Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A practical way to teach web programming in computer science

Nowadays, web-based applications have become more and more popular in computer-based applications. Learning and mastering web programming environment, techniques, and methods are becoming necessary for undergraduate students in computer science. Traditional curriculum in computer science usually does not include web programming course. It is a great challenge to design and implement an effective course to teach web programming so that a computer science student can learn and master necessary knowledge and skills for efficiently developing interactive web-based database-driven applications. Recently, I designed and taught a web programming course for junior and senior undergraduate students in computer science. The course mainly focused on teaching the server-side programming techniques with open source software PHP and MySQL. Considering that many students had not systematically learned the basic client-side web development techniques and software tools, the course allotted 1/3 time to review and teach XHTML, CSS, HTTP, JavaScript, and Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks. This paper discusses the details of the design and implementation for the web programming course including course contents, structure, implementation, demonstration, assignments, final project, outcomes and feedback. The paper can provide some useful information and directions for other instructors teaching the same course in computer science.
Knowledge and practice of breast self-examination among undergraduate students in Bahir Dar University, North-West Ethiopia, 2016: A cross-sectional study

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, with nearly 1.7 million new cases diagnosed each year which accounts 12% of all new cancer cases and 25% of all cancers in women. Breast self-examination offers women the best opportunity for reducing breast cancer deaths. From a total of 222 respondents about 190 (85.6%) heard about breast selfexamination. One hundred forty-three (75.3%) had good knowledge about sign and symptoms of breast cancer and 47 (24.7%) had poor knowledge about the sign and symptoms of breast cancer. From total respondents of the study 120 (54.1%) practiced breast self-examination. Breast selfexamination practice is relatively frequent problem in Bahir Dar University, health science students. Negligence, forgetfulness and lack of knowledge are the main factors for poor practice of breast self-examination. Public health education using the media, clubs and leaflet could significantly reduce poor practice of breast self-examination and increases early detection of breast lump.
Load Balance Mechanism for Cloud Resource Provision Based on Virtual Machine Migration

The diversity of application demands and the heterogeneity of resources may lead to load imbalance in cloud resource provision. Aiming at this problem, a Virtual Machine (VM) resource provision genetic algorithm based on load balance, VMPGALB is presented in this paper. VMPGALB adopts a tree coding scheme, which is more suitable to reflect the characteristics of VM resource provision. When design the selection strategy, the proportion selection strategy based on fitness and the elite-preserving strategy are applied, which make individuals with smaller fitness be selected possibly and retain the best individuals directly to the offspring. For devising the crossover operator, VMPGALB has a better crossover performance through the crossover operation of two parent individuals and applying the spanning tree method. Meanwhile, in order to avoid a local optimum, VMPGALB enforces mutation operations on individuals according to a certain percentage. The experimental results show that VMPGALB could not only get better genetic performance and fewer VM migration numbers, but also gain the load balance scheme of VM resource provision with a faster convergence speed.
Resistance of digital watermarks to collusive attacks

In digital watermarking (also called digital fingerprinting), extra information is embedded imperceptibly into digital content (such as an audio track, a still image, or a movie). This extra information can be read by authorized parties, and other users attempting to remove the watermark cannot do so without destroying the value of the content by making perceptible changes to the content. This provides a disincentive to copying by allowing copies to be traced to their original owner. Unlike cryptography, digital watermarking provides protection to content that is in the clear. It is not easy to design watermarks that are hard to erase, especially if an attacker has access to several differently marked copies of the same base content. Cox et al. (see IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, vol.6, no.12, p.1673-87, 1997) have proposed the use of additive normally distributed values as watermarks, and have sketched an argument showing that, in a certain theoretical model, such watermarks are resistant to collusive attacks. Here, we fill in the mathematical justification for this claim.
Fuzzy set based error measure for hydrologic model evaluation

Traditional error measures (e.g. mean squared error, mean relative error) are often used in the field of water resources to evaluate the performance of models developed for modeling various hydrological processes. However, these measures may not always provide a comprehensive assessment of the performance of the model intended for a specific application. A new error measure is proposed and developed in this paper to fill the gap left by existing traditional error measures for performance evaluation. The measure quantifies the error that corresponds to the hydrologic condition and model application under consideration and also facilitates selection of the best model whenever multiple models are available for that application. Fuzzy set theory is used to model the modeler’s perceptions of predictive accuracy in specific applications. The development of the error measure is primarily intended for use with models that provide hydrologic time series predictions. Hypothetical and real-life examples are used to illustrate and evaluate this measure. Results indicate that use of this measure is rational and meaningful in the selection process of an appropriate model from a set of competing models.
Weed Control Ability of Single Sown Cover Crops Compared to Species Mixtures

To achieve efficient weed control through cover cropping, the plant species chosen needs particular consideration. Combing different cover crop (CC) species in mixtures may increase the number of provided ecosystem services, including reliable suppression of weeds. We tested the weed suppression ability of single CC species and CC mixtures in a field trial during the autumn-to-winter growing season of 2016 and 2017. Anethum graveolens L. (dill), Raphanus sativus var. oleiformis Pers. (oilseed radish), Avena strigosa Schreb. (black oat), Carthamus tinctorius L. (safflower), Vicia sativa L. (vetch) and Phacelia tanacetifolia Benth. (phacelia) were sown in monocultures, as well as in mixtures with three or six species. Treatments with favorable establishment and above-average biomass yields tended to suppress weeds by showing lower weed dry matter and weed numbers. The highest weed control efficacy within the monocultures was reached in 2017 by black oat and oilseed radish with 72% and 83%, respectively. The mixture treatments reached a generally lower soil cover, aboveground dry matter and weed control efficacy (with an average of 57% in 2017). Even though mixtures were not as effective as the best performing single sown CCs, species combinations increased resilience against adverse weather conditions, an advantage to achieving efficient weed control over a long-term period. Therefore, species composition within mixtures is more relevant than the number of species included.
Control of Avian Coccidiosis: Present and Future Strategies for Natural Alternatives of Therapeutics

Avian coccidiosis has great economic impacts on poultry enterprise. Coccidiosis is caused byEimeria species mostly affecting epithelium of the birds intestines causing enteric problems. Prominentclinical outcomes are bloody diarrhoea, poor FCR, weight gain and growth rate with high morbidity andmortality rate. For the control of coccidiosis various strategies have been adapted including chemicalagents and feed additives. But due to their repeated use, drug resistance to Eimeria species emerged thusbadly affecting their efficacy. Moreover, these chemical agents have adverse effects on birds health andmeat quality. Therefore, alternatives are used nowadays including natural and herbal products having thedesired efficacy without harmful effects. Natural products and their anticoccidial activity have beenreviewed in this study. This group comprises herbal extracts, fatty acids, fungal extracts, probiotics andimmune response immunomodulators with proven anticoccidial activity. Additionally, poultry industryand economic cost of coccidiosis as well as classical strategies used in the control of avian coccidiosis arealso reviewed.
Accurate Object Recognition with Assembling Appearance and Motion Information

How to effectively detect object and accurately give out its visible parts is a major challenge for object detection. In this paper we propose an explicit occlusion model through integrating appearance and motion information. The model combines together two parts: part-level object detection with single frame and object occlusion estimation with continuous frames. It breaks through the performance bottleneck caused by lack of information and effectively improves object detection rate under severe occlusion. Through reevaluating the semantic parts, the detecting performance of partial object detectors is largely enhanced. The explicit model enables the partial detectors to have the capability of occlusion estimation. By discarding the geometric representation in rigid single-angle perspective and applying effective pattern of objective shape, our proposed approaches greatly improve the performance and robustness of similarity measurement. For validating the performance of proposed methods, we designed a comparative experiment on challenging pedestrian frame sequences database. The experimental results on challenging pedestrian frame sequence demonstrate that, compared to the traditional algorithms, the methods proposed in this paper have significantly improved the detection rate for severe occlusion. Furthermore, it also can achieve better localization of semantic parts and estimation of occluding.
Banana xanthomonas wilt and potato bacterial wilt in Rwanda

Banana (Musa spp.) and potato (Solanum tuberosum) are important food and cash crops worldwide as they contribute to food security and income generation for farmers. Despite their importance, banana and potato do not reach their potential production due to a number of limitations, including pests and diseases. In Rwanda, banana xanthomonas wilt caused by Xanthomonas campestris pv. musacearum and potato bacterial wilt caused by the Ralstonia solanacearum species complex (RSSC) are the major diseases of banana and potato respectively. These disease-causing bacteria have similar transmission means and the two crops are vegetatively propagated. Little is known about these diseases in Rwanda. The aim of this study was to investigate the biology, risk factors and farmers’ awareness of banana xanthomonas wilt and potato bacterial wilt and how they affect disease occurrence in Rwanda. Surveys revealed that both diseases were present in major and minor growing areas for potato and banana. Banana xanthomonas wilt incidence varied between 27 to 77 % in 2015 and from 26 to 86% in 2016. Disease incidence ranged between 5 and 24 % in 2014 for potato bacterial wilt. These records are high considering the importance of the crops. The farmers’ knowledge and implementation of management strategies were insufficient for both diseases, due to inaccessibility to adequate information. Cultural practices such as mono-cropping, intercropping, wide spacing and avoidance of sharing tools were highly associated with low potato bacterial wilt occurrence (p < 0.05), whereas dense spacing, intercropping and beer bananas were linked to high occurrence of banana xanthomonas wilt (p < 0.05). The population of the RSSC causing potato bacterial wilt in Rwanda is dominated by phylotype II strains (Ralstonia solanacearum emend. Safni). The isolates used in host range and cultivar susceptibility tests to the bacteria, X. campestris pv. musacearum and R. solanacearum, infected only banana or potato respectively and their close relatives, and all the inoculated cultivars were susceptible but at relatively different levels. These studies have improved our understanding of banana xanthomonas wilt and potato bacterial wilt in Rwanda, and provided important insights towards development and communication of sustainable management approach for the diseases, which in turn will improve food security in the country.
Toxicology Assessment of Ocimum tenuiflorum L. Leaves Extracts on Streptozotocin-Induced Diabetic Rats :

Toxicology Assessment of Ocimum tenuiflorum L. Leaves Extracts on Streptozotocin-Induced Diabetic Rats Leila Mousavi1, Rabeta Mohd Salleh*1, Vikneswaran Murugaiyah2 1Food Technology Division, School of Industrial Technology, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Minden, Penang, Malaysia. 2Discipline of Pharmacology, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Minden, Penang, Malaysia ___________________________________________________________________________ Abstract The present study was aimed out to investigate the effects of different solvent extracts from Ocimum tenuiflorum L. leaves on lipid profile, liver function, and kidney functions of streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats and toxicology assessment. In this study Ocimum tenuiflorum leaves solvent crude extracts were used for an acute test for 14th days. Diabetes was induced in Spargue-Dawley rats by intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of streptozotocin. All the diabetic rats were under treated by oral admonition of extracts (1000 mg/kg) for fourteen days. After 14th days of treatment blood was withdrawn for biochemical and haematological tests. Kidney, pancreas and liver discarded for histopathology assessment of toxicity effect on organs. Blood glucose level and other biochemical measurements in streptozotocin-induced rats compared with the control group showed fluctuating levels in a different parameter. Histological analysis of tissues indicated there were no adverse changes in the liver, kidneys, and pancreas compared to the control group. According to our result, Ocimum tenuiflorum methanol leaf extract as a medium polarity solvent extract had possibly exerts of an antihyperglycaemic effects through major bioactive compounds that be able to control diabetes. A clinical study is needed to confirm the antidiabetic potential of this plant. Keywords: Biochemical, Histopathology, Haematology parameters, Ocimum tenuiflorum L. , Sprague Dawley rats, streptozotocin (STZ) ___________________________________________________________________________ ARTICLE INFO Received 15th November 2018 Received in revised form 17th December 2018 Accepted 17th December 2018 *Corresponding author: Dr Rabeta Mohd Salleh Tel: ++604 653 5211 e mail: rabeta@usm.edu. my Copyright Malaysian Journal of Microscopy (2018). All rights reserved. ISSN: 1823-7010 eISSN 2600-7444
Misfolded α-synuclein causes hyperactive respiration without functional deficit in live neuroblastoma cells

ABSTRACT The misfolding and aggregation of the largely disordered protein, α-synuclein, is a central pathogenic event that occurs in the synucleinopathies, a group of neurodegenerative disorders that includes Parkinson's disease. While there is a clear link between protein misfolding and neuronal vulnerability, the precise pathogenic mechanisms employed by disease-associated α-synuclein are unresolved. Here, we studied the pathogenicity of misfolded α-synuclein produced using the protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) assay. To do this, previous published methods were adapted to allow PMCA-induced protein fibrillization to occur under non-toxic conditions. Insight into potential intracellular targets of misfolded α-synuclein was obtained using an unbiased lipid screen of 15 biologically relevant lipids that identified cardiolipin (CA) as a potential binding partner for PMCA-generated misfolded α-synuclein. To investigate whether such an interaction can impact the properties of α-synuclein misfolding, protein fibrillization was carried out in the presence of the lipid. We show that CA both accelerates the rate of α-synuclein fibrillization and produces species that harbour enhanced resistance to proteolysis. Because CA is virtually exclusively expressed in the inner mitochondrial membrane, we then assessed the ability of these misfolded species to alter mitochondrial respiration in live non-transgenic SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells. Extensive analysis revealed that misfolded α-synuclein causes hyperactive mitochondrial respiration without causing any functional deficit. These data give strong support for the mitochondrion as a target for misfolded α-synuclein and reveal persistent, hyperactive respiration as a potential upstream pathogenic event associated with the synucleinopathies. This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper. Summary: Misfolded α-synuclein produced using the protein misfolding cyclic amplification assay associates with cardiolipin and causes hyperactive respiration in neuronal cells.
Teaching Software Testing with Automated Feedback

Andrew DeOrio is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and a consultant for web, machine learning and hardware projects. His research interests are in ensuring the correctness of computer systems, including medical devices, internet of things (IOT) devices, and digital hardware. In addition to teaching software and hardware courses, he teaches Creative Process and works with students on technology-driven creative projects.
Automatic alignment of speech with phonetic transcriptions in real time

A system to align speech waveforms with the corresponding phonetic transcriptions is described. The alignment is mainly based on the labeling of speech frames centisecond apart to phonetic classes. A novel method based on neural network principles is used to accomplish the labeling. Another major source of information utilized is spectral stationarity. The alignment is performed in two main stages. First, a list of phonetic events having stationary properties is constructed. The phonetic transcription is roughly aligned with this list. A more detailed boundary refinement is then carried out using heuristic speech-specific knowledge. The system is running on standard IBM PC/AT in real time. It is used for on-line speaker enrollment and syntactic correction analysis in addition to establishing a database for speech recognition research. <<ETX>>
An Inference-based Framework for Managing Data Provenance

Scientists can facilitate data intensive applications to study and understand the behavior of a complex system. In a data intensive application, a scientific model facilitates raw data products, collected from various sources, to produce new data products. Based on the generated output, scientists used to make decisions that could potentially affect the system which is being studied. Therefore, it is important to have the ability of tracing an output data product back to its source values if that particular output seems to have an unexpected value. Data provenance helps scientists to investigate the origin of an unexpected value. Provenance could be also used to validate a scientific model. Existing provenance-aware systems have their own set of constructs to design the workflow of a scientific model for extracting workflow provenance. Using these systems requires extensive training for scientists. Preparing workflow provenance manually is also not a feasible option since it is a time consuming task. Moreover, the existing systems document provenance records explicitly to build a fine-grained provenance trace which is used for tracing back to source data. Since most of the scientific computations handle massive amounts of data, the storage overhead to maintain provenance data becomes a major concern. We address the aforesaid challenges by introducing a framework managing both workflow and fine-grained data provenance in a generic and cost-efficient way. The framework is capable of extracting workflow provenance of a scientific model automatically at reduced effort and time. It also infers fine-grained data provenance without explicit documentation of provenance records. Therefore, the framework reduces the storage consumption to maintain provenance data. We introduce a suite of inference-based methods addressing different execution environments to make the framework more generic in nature. Moreover, the framework has the self-adaptability feature so that it can provide optimally accurate provenance at minimal storage costs. Our evaluation based on two use cases shows that the framework provides a generic, cost-efficient solution to scientists who want to manage data provenance for their data intensive applications.
Fluorescence quenching of bioactive molecules by nanodiamonds

In this work, the fluorescence quenching of two types of bioactive molecules – of the protein lysozyme and of the drug doxorubicin – by carboxylated detonation nanodiamonds in the result of their interaction has been studied. It was demonstrated that nanodiamonds effectively quench the fluorescence of lysozyme and doxorubicin but by different mechanisms. It was found that the fluorescence quenching of lysozyme by nanodiamonds is caused only by a static type of quenching while the fluorescence quenching of doxorubicin by nanodiamonds is caused by both static and dynamic types of quenching. We propose a hypothesis that the surface groups of nanodiamonds are the quenchers of the fluorescence and the variety of surface groups with which a fluorescent molecule interacts determines the fluorescence quenching mechanism. The accounting of our results will provide the insight in the nanodiamonds’ visualization as well as the possible way to track the loading and subsequent unloading of drugs from the nanodiamonds’ surface.