Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of sugar content, mineral elements and antioxidant properties of Heterotrigona itama honey from suburban and forest in Malaysia

Introduction: In Malaysia, Heterotrigona itama sp. (stingless bee) industries start to grow rapidly since 2015 but the study on its health benefit is still lacking. This study was aimed to analyse and compare the sugar content, minerals and antioxidant properties of stingless bee honey collected from forest and suburban area in Malaysia. Methods: Sugar content was determined by HPLC, minerals and heavy metals was determined by Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES) and Atomic Absorption Spectrometer (AAS), total phenolic content (TPC) and total flavonoid content (TFC) by Folin-Ciocalteu and aluminium chloride colorimetry method, respectively. For determining the antioxidant activity of the samples, 2,2-diphenyl-1-(2,4,6-trinitrophenyl) hydrazyl (DPPH), 2,2’-azi-no-bis-3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS) and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) assay were used. Results: Fructose, glucose and sucrose are found in all samples in range of 16.03-33.13 g/100g, 8.63-20.72 g/100g and 2.68-34.04 g/100g, respectively. Potassium and sodium were major minerals in all stingless bee honey with an average of 622.36 and 496.01 mg/kg, respectively. Sample from the forest (Sibu, F2) has the highest TPC and TFC with value 520.663±8. 119μg GAE/g and 443.25±18. 194μg RE/g, respectively. The higher antioxidant activities (DPPH, ABTS, FRAP) also found in samples collected from the forest (F2) with 602.15±12.7 μg TE/g, 575.18±9.38 μg TE/g and 641.36±42. 11μg TE/g, respectively. Conclusion: All stingless bee honey studied shown a significant amount of important minerals and antioxidant properties with samples from forest clearly shown significantly higher TPC and TFC as well as the antioxidant activity than samples collected from the suburban area.
The personal vote and party cohesion: Modeling the effects of electoral rules on intraparty politics

Conventional wisdom suggests that parties in candidate-centered electoral systems should be associated with less cohesive policy preferences among legislators. We model the incentives of party leaders to achieve voting unity accounting for the costs of discipline, showing that candidate-centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting party agreement on policies and preference cohesion. These implications for cohesion derive from the degree of control over list rank held by leaders under open lists (open-list proportional representation, OLPR) and closed lists (closed-list proportional representation, CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR, owing to leaders’ lack of control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that promote agreement between members and leadership. Under CLPR, however, leaders can more easily achieve voting unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote internal agreement. We then extend the model to allow the party leader to replace members, showing that preference cohesion itself is greater under OLPR. Further, our baseline results hold when allowing legislative behavior to affect vote share and when accounting for candidates’ valence qualities. We interpret our results to suggest that candidate-centered systems result in stronger incentives for developing programmatic parties, compared with party-centered systems.
Modelling soil water dynamics and root water uptake for apple trees under water storage pit irrigation

Water storage pit irrigation is a new method suitable for apple trees. It comes with advantages such as water saving, water retention and drought resistance. A precise study of soil water movement and root water uptake is essential to analyse and show the advantages of the method. In this study, a mathematical model (WSPI-WR model) for 3D soil water movement and root water uptake under water storage pit irrigation was established based on soil water dynamics and soil moisture and root distributions. Moreover, this model also considers the soil evaporation, pit wall evaporation and water level variation in the pit. The finite element method was used to solve the model, and the law of mass conservation was used to analyse the water level variation. The model was validated by experimental data of the sap flow of apple trees and soil moisture in the orchard. Results showed that the WSPI-WR model is highly accurate in simulating the root water uptake and soil water distributions. The WSPI-WR model can be used to simulate root water uptake and soil water movement under water storage pit irrigation. The simulation showed that orchard soil water content and root water uptake rate centers on the storage pit with an ellipsoid distribution. The maximum distribution region of soil water and root water uptake rate was near the bottom of the pit. Distribution can reduce soil evaporation in the orchard and improve the soil water use efficiency in the middle-deep soil. Keywords: root water uptake, soil water dynamics, numerical simulation, water storage pit irrigation, apple tree DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe. 20191205.4005 Citation: Guo X H, Lei T, Sun X H, Ma J J, Zheng L J, Zhang S W, et al. Modelling soil water dynamics and root water uptake for apple trees under water storage pit irrigation. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2019; 12(5): 126–134.
Composite fading in non-line-of-sight off-body communications channels

In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of the composite fading observed in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) offbody communications channels using the η-μ/inverse gamma distribution. We use a number of different datasets obtained from NLOS off-body measurements which have been performed in a range of different environments at 5.8 GHz and 60 GHz. In all cases, the bodyworn node was positioned on the front-central chest region of an adult male. It is shown that the η-μ/inverse gamma model provides an excellent fit to the measurement data for all of the considered cases. Using the Akaike information criterion (AIC), we have compared the η-μ/inverse gamma model with other composite and non-composite fading models associated with the NLOS channel conditions. The AIC results confirm that the η-μ/inverse gamma model was the most likely model to have been responsible for generating the channel data from the set of candidates which were considered.
Investments in agricultural research and development: recent transformations in Brazil

89 Rev. Bras. Inov. , Campinas (SP), 18 (1), p. 89-120, janeiro/junho 2019 Rev. Bras. Inov. , Campinas (SP), 18 (1), p. 89-120, janeiro/junho 2019 Investments in agricultural research and development: recent transformations in Brazil Jaim José da Silva Júnior* José Maria Jardim da Silveira** Andréa Leda Ramos de Oliveira*** Caroline Nascimento Pereira**** Carolina da Silveira Bueno***** Carl Esek Pray******
A Survey on Text Segmentation Methods for Digital Images

— Images are important information carriers which are often used in email messages and web pages to attach textual information. In Born digital compound image (BDCI) text and graphics/pictures come together on digital devices having certain distinct characteristics like low resolution (easy for online transmission and to display on screen) and text is created digitally on image. Text from BDCI can be effectively adopted for large number of applications likes to retrieve contents of web, to improve indexing, to enhance content accessibility and content filtering. There are several problems to distinguish texts from BDCI because, text appears in various styles (i.e. Orientation, size, and color), some neighbor texts are connected, and some text characters are superimposed on pictorial region which may lead to misclassification. Although researchers have proposed many methods in which character-level and block-based objects are commonly assumed to separate text from compound images. But these methods failed to extract reliable features to detect all texts as well as to identify connected components. Some recent methods based on distribution of pixel variations and image activity measures can able to precisely segment textual regions from BDCI.
Joint Sink Mobility and Routing to Maximize the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks: The Case of Constrained Mobility

The longevity of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a major issue that impacts the application of such networks. While communication protocols are striving to save energy by acting on sensor nodes, recent results show that network lifetime can be prolonged by further involving sink mobility. As most proposals give their evidence of lifetime improvement through either (small-scale) field tests or numerical simulations on rather arbitrary cases, a theoretical understanding of the reason for this improvement and the tractability of the joint optimization problem is still missing. In this paper, we build a framework for investigating the joint sink mobility and routing problem by constraining the sink to a finite number of locations. We formally prove the NP-hardness of the problem. We also investigate the induced subproblems. In particular, we develop an efficient primal-dual algorithm to solve the subproblem involving a single sink, then we generalize this algorithm to approximate the original problem involving multiple sinks. Finally, we apply the algorithm to a set of typical topological graphs; the results demonstrate the benefit of involving sink mobility, and they also suggest the desirable moving traces of a sink.
A non-randomized interventional study to promote the knowledge, attitude and practices of community pharmacists towards pharmacovigilance

Pharmacovigilance promotes the safe and effective use of medicines and thereby optimizes the treatment quality. However, lack of awareness among community pharmacists towards pharmacovigilance decreases the proportion of adverse drug reactions reported and impairs the signal detection process. Hence this study was designed to assess and promote the awareness and attitude of community pharmacists towards pharmacovigilance. This educational interventional study was carried out with 102 community pharmacists across Chennai. A pre-validated three domain-containing questionnaire, 20 items was used to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice before and after the educational intervention. Knowledge, attitude and practices of community pharmacists towards pharmacovigilance was significantly increased after the educational intervention (P<0.05, 95%CI). Median difference in an overall score of knowledge and practice was observed to be 4 and 4.5, respectively. Though the frequency of ADR reporting was not found to be greatly increased in our study, mass educational programs with adequate sampling intervals are needed to strengthen the signal generation process.
FAST VISUAL GROUNDING IN INTERACTION Bringing few-shot learning with neural networks to an interactive robot

A big challenge for the development situated agents is that they need to be capable of grounding real objects of their enviroment to representations with semantic meaning, so they can be comunicated to human agents using the human language. de Graaf (2016) developed the KILLE framework, which is a static camerabased robot capable of learning objects and spatial relations from very few samples using image processing algorithms suitable for learning from few samples. However, this framework has a major shortcoming: the time needed to recognise an object increased greatly as the system learned more objects, which motivates us to design a more efficient object recognition module. The following project researches a way to improve object recognition of the same robot framework using a neural network approach suitable for learning from very few image samples: Matching Networks (Vinyals et al., 2016). Our work also investigates how transfer learning form large datasets could be used to improve the object recognition performance and to make learning faster, which are very important features for a robot that interacts online with humans. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of our situated agent with transfer learning from pre-trained models and different conversational strategies with a human tutor. Results show that the robot system is capable of training models really fast and gets very good object recognition performance for small domains.
Temporal and spatial analysis of ozone concentrations in Europe based on timescale decomposition and a multi-clustering approach

Abstract. Air quality measures that were implemented in Europe in the 1990s resulted in reductions of ozone precursor concentrations. In this study, the effect of these reductions on ozone is investigated by analyzing surface measurements of this pollutant for the time period between 2000 and 2015. Using a nonparametric timescale decomposition methodology, the long-term, seasonal and short-term variation in ozone observations were extracted. A clustering algorithm was applied to the different timescale variations, leading to a classification of sites across Europe based on the temporal characteristics of ozone. The clustering based on the long-term variation resulted in a site-type classification, while a regional classification was obtained based on the seasonal and short-term variations. Long-term trends of deseasonalized mean and meteo-adjusted peak ozone concentrations were calculated across large parts of Europe for the time period 2000–2015. A multidimensional scheme was used for a detailed trend analysis, based on the identified clusters, which reflect precursor emissions and meteorological influence either on the inter-annual or the short-term timescale. Decreasing mean ozone concentrations at rural sites and increasing or stabilizing at urban sites were observed. At the same time, downward trends for peak ozone concentrations were detected for all site types. In addition, a reduction of the amplitude in the seasonal cycle of ozone and a shift in the occurrence of the seasonal maximum towards earlier time of the year were observed. Finally, a reduced sensitivity of ozone to temperature was identified. It was concluded that long-term trends of mean and peak ozone concentrations are mostly controlled by precursor emissions changes, while seasonal cycle trends and changes in the sensitivity of ozone to temperature are among other factors driven by regional climatic conditions.
Prior antithrombotic use is significantly associated with decreased blood viscosity within 24 hours of symptom onset in patients with acute ischemic stroke

Prior antithrombotic use is significantly associated with decreased blood viscosity within 24 hours of symptom onset in patients with acute ischemic stroke Joong Hyun Park, MD; Jeong Yeon Kim, MD, PhD; Jong Sam Baik, MD, PhD; Jae Hyeon Park, MD, PhD; Hyo Suk Nam, MD, PhD; Sang Won Han, MD Department of Neurology, Inje University Sanggye Paik Hospital, Inje University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea Department of Neurology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea ORIGINAL ARTICLE J Neurocrit Care [Epub ahead of print] https://doi.org/10.18700/jnc.190092
Progress in the numerical modelling of dynamic testing for reinforcement and retaining elements used in underground excavations

In the last century the expansion of mining into high stress environments, where there are rockburst events caused by energy release, have become especially interesting for mining engineers in terms of geomechanics. These phenomena have prompted changes in conventional designs, implying more research into how underground excavations absorb dynamic impacts. Testing programs carried out globally by recognised institutions have provided guidelines for the development of new support systems in the last 30 years. Therefore, new reinforcement elements and retaining elements capable of both resisting dynamic loads and yielding in the process without failing have been introduced in order to ensure safety of underground excavations. However, the integration of these elements under dynamic loads is a research area recently under development. The execution of these testing programs implies a high cost in time and validation, hence a limited number of these have been completed. Numerical modelling to represent the performance of the dynamic process and enhance laboratory testing has become increasingly necessary and relevant. This paper summarises improvements in the numerical modelling of dynamic testing, developed by the University of Chile and supported by MIRARCO (Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation), for elements that constitute rock support used in underground excavations. An update of the numerical modelling of dynamic testing for threadbar used as rock reinforcement is presented. As well as the work carried out to date in the development of a numerical model of dynamic tests for a mesh used as a surface retaining element is illustrated.
The Gut Microbiome Modulates the Changes in Liver Metabolism and in Inflammatory Processes in the Brain of Chronic Unpredictable Mild Stress Rats

Generally, depression is the result of complex gene-environment interactions. Recent studies have showed that the gut microbiota can affect brain function through the microbiota-gut-brain axis. However, the underlying mechanism of the microbiota and potential influence of depression remain elusive. We aimed to determine how gut microbiome contributes to the process of depression and further influences the host. Chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) is used to establish a depression model. Fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) is applied to illustrate that depression can be transmitted via microbiota, and metabolism of liver analysis is applied to demonstrate further influence to the liver. We also analyzed the astrocyte activation in the brain by immunofluorescence (IF). Here, we show that the structure of the gut microbiome changes markedly after rats undergo CUMS. Notably, we found that the ratio of Lactobacillus to Clostridium can be a vital index for the development of depression. Depression-like behavior can be duplicated through FMT. Moreover, increased zonulin and fatty acid binding protein-2 indicates that gut barrier integrity is broken after FMT. Subsequently, metabolomics shows that liver metabolic disorder occurs and leads to liver coagulative necrosis. In addition, increased inflammatory cytokine expression and higher astrocyte activation indicate an inflammatory process in the brain. These findings suggest that dysbiosis gut microbiome contributes to development of depression and further causes liver metabolic disorders in a way that may be relevant to the Lactobacillus to Clostridium ratio.
Study of the relationship between the production of milk and some of its components with the growth of lambs in two breeds of Iraqi sheep

A total of 1116 records Awassi ewes and 432 of Hamdania ewes were collected and which belong animals resource department, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Mosul for the years 2008, 2009 and 2010 to study the effect of genetic and non-genetic factors in milk production and some of its components from birth until weaning. The results showed significant effects (p≤0.05) for the breed and highly significant effects (p≤ 0.001) for the year, mother's age, sex, and type of birth in the daily milk production. There was a highly significant effect of year in milk fat, protein, and lactose. same there was a significant effect for age at weaning on birth weight, and highly significant effects for the breed, year, age of dam, sex, type of birth, and age at weaning on birth, weaning and weight gain from birth to weaning. The highest value for repeatability was 0.398, 0.309 in Awassi ewes for weight gain and in Hamdani ewes for daily milk yield respectively. Phenotypic and genetic correlation between protein and lactose in Awassi ewes 0.507 and 0.410, and in Hamdani ewes 0.641 and 0.157 respectively were highly significant.
Cooling the soft tissue and its effect on perception of pain during infiltration and block anesthesia in children undergoing dental procedures: A comparative study

Background. This study assessed the effect of cooling the soft tissue site on the perception of pain in children undergoing local anesthesia for routine dental procedures. Methods. One hundred children, 6‒14 years of age, were assigned to either of the two study groups, i.e., group 1 (infiltration) and group 2 (block anesthesia). One side of the arch served as the test side, where an ice pretreatment (IP) of the soft tissue of the injection site was carried out using a tube of ice for one minute, whereas the opposite side served as the control, where no ice pretreatment (WIP) was carried out. This was followed by the gradual injection of local anesthetic solution. The children’s pain perception was assessed by VAS, WB-FPRS and SEM scales. The data were analyzed statistically. Results. WBS, VAS and SEM scores were significantly different between the WIP and IP in both groups, indicating that ice was effective in reducing the pain perception in children. Intergroup comparison revealed no significant differences (P>0.05), indicating that cooling was equally effective in infiltration and block anesthesia. Conclusion. Cooling the soft tissue site helped decrease pain perception during injection in children.
Mini review on the design of axial type eddy current braking technology

Eddy Current Brake (ECB) is a type of electric braking that uses eddy current to produce braking forces. This article delivers a solid review of the design of Axial ECB, which is very promising for an alternative braking system. Several types of axial ECB are classified and named as a single disk, double disk, and unipolar model. The classification of axial ECB is based on the design of coil placement, which induces axial area of the disk as well as the electromagnet source. A potential issue for the development of axial ECB is also discussed to explore the braking performance improvement of the axial type ECB. It was highlighted that research on how to change the direction of magnetic field vectors by changing the shape of the pole-shoe on the electromagnetic ECB in axial type has not been widely studied. Therefore, this issue would be interesting for future investigation.
Material Flow Analysis as a Decision Supporting Tool for Faecal Sludge Resource Recovery: Mathematical Formulation and Quantification

In this work, a conceptual framework for faecal sludge (FS) management and resource recovery in Dar es Salaam city was developed. Material Flow Analysis (MFA) approach was used to assess and quantify the current materials and nutrients to support on decisions for nutrient recovery and minimize environmental pollution in three unplanned settlements of Manzese, Keko and Kipawa in Dar es Salaam city. Nitrogen and Phosphorus were chosen as indicators for the evaluation of the process. The results showed that about 75% of the Dar es Salaam city population relies on pit latrines and 15% connected to septic tanks, translating to a large amount of faecal sludge being contained onsite. The situational analysis study on faecal sludge management (FSM) showed that the collection, treatment and proper disposal of FS are the major challenges that pose risks to public health. Currently, 57% of faecal sludge generated in Dar es Salaam is disposed to the environment inappropriately. Onsite Sanitation Systems in all study areas are the main polluters, discharging large quantity of nutrients to the environment. About 37.7% of faecal sludge is with large amount of nutrients emptied from onsite sanitation systems discharged to the environment and through seepage to the groundwater.