Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of organic waste as an alternative organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer to ameliorate acid soil productivity

Liquid waste generated in large quantities in the palm oil mill has low pH and high organic content and its use as an organic amendment could offer an environmentally friendly management strategy. This pot experiment aimed to evaluate the impact of organic waste of the liquid waste from the palm oil mill and synthetic fertilizer on organic carbon and nutrients of an acid soil and soybean yield. The treatments consisted of no synthetic fertilizers, half recommended dose of synthetic fertilizers (0.5R), synthetic fertilizers as recommended 50 kg ha -1 Urea + 200 kg ha -1 SP-36 + 150 kg ha -1 KCl (R) and organic waste with doses of 0, 5, 10, 15 and 20 t ha -1 . The experiment was arranged in a completely randomized design with a factorial pattern and three replications. The results demonstrated that there was no significant interaction on soil chemical characteristics by the addition of organic waste and synthetic fertilizers. However, organic waste addition increased soil pH, total organic C, labile organic C, humic acid C, total N, available P, exchangeable K, and cation exchange capacity (CEC), whereas synthetic fertilizer addition only increased available P and exchangeable K. Exchangeable Al was significantly reduced by organic waste while significant effect didn’t occur with synthetic fertilizers. The treatment of organic waste increased total organic C content by 7-24%. A larger sensitivity was indicated by labile organic C compared to total organic C and humic acid C so that labile organic C is a better indicator of alterations of soil organic C owing to organic waste treatment. The treatment of organic waste and synthetic fertilizers showed significant interactions on the dry weight of soybean seed, shoot, and root. The addition of synthetic fertilizers without organic waste increased the dry weight of the soybean seed, shoot and root by 133%, 133% and 140% respectively, while with the addition of 15 t ha -1 organic waste combined with synthetic fertilizer, enhancements by 262%, 261%, and 206% in the dry weight of seed, shoot and root were respectively found.
In situ Degradation Monitoring of SiC MOSFET Based on Switching Transient Measurement

This paper presents an silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET health condition monitoring method based on the switching transient measurements. Specifically, the device's turn-on time is used as the aging precursor, and a detection circuit is developed with picosecond resolution to detect the variations of the turn-on time. For this purpose, power cycles with constant junction temperature swings are applied on sample devices to accelerate their thermally triggered degradation. Over the aging process, device parameters are measured periodically using automated curve tracer to observe degradation-related changes. Also, a double pulse tester is used to evaluate devices’ switching transient changes throughout aging. Based on these results, both the theoretical discussions and experimental results imply that device turn-on time is a viable aging precursor and can be used to monitor device health at system start-up. High-resolution capture module of readily available system microcontroller is employed to measure the turn-on time through a simple auxiliary interface circuit on a buck converter. Experimental results show that onboard device aging can successfully be achieved during systems start-up in the order of microseconds.
Assessment of protein structure predictions

Since the beginning of the 1980s, protein structure prediction and simulation have been one of the most challenging tasks for computational structure biology. Although progress has been made, one can openly say that reliably predicting the fold of all known protein sequences is still far from reach. Current approaches can predict a three-dimensional (3D) protein structure for parts of ~60% of the sequences of an average genome. Recently, automatic large-scale predictions of 3D structure models are being made available on the web. For example, the ModBase database currently stores more than 4.2 million models, the SwissModel repository stores ~1.3 million models, and the PMDB database stores ~75 000 models. Therefore, comparative protein structure modeling is filling the gap between the known sequence and structure spaces. In the post-genomic era, a more difficult task lies ahead in annotating, understanding, and modifying the function of proteins. This task is greatly aided by the knowledge of the protein structures, as the biochemical function of a protein is determined by its structure and
Development and Testing of a Mobile Pseudolite Concept for Precise Positioning

The concept of using a pseudolite in the reverse mode where the pseudolite is positioned with respect to receivers deployed at known points is presented. Two types of double-difference positioning approaches for eliminating clock and other code and carrier-phase biases are described and analyzed-pseudolite positioning with satellite reference (PPSR) and pseudolite positioning with pseudolite reference (PPPR). Results are given for an initial test conducted in a land vehicle at Holloman APB, New Mexico. The test range consisted of a 600 m course surrounded by six receivers deployed in a noncoplanar configuration at distances ranging from 100 to 1,500 m from the vehicle. The pseudolite position was calculated using both integer and floating-point carrier-phase ambiguities, and the resulting trajectory was analyzed to assess the differential positioning performance of this inverted GPS system.
When Buffett Meets Bollinger: An Integrated Approach to Fundamental and Technical Analysis

Motivated by the implication of return extrapolation models that a joint consideration of past price changes and firm fundamentals could efficiently identify stock mispricing, we propose an integrated approach that combines fundamental and technical information. This integrated approach generates substantial economic gains, which are comparable to those of strategies double‐sorted on characteristics related to high turnover and trading costs and state‐of‐the‐art machine learning strategies in existing studies. The performance net of transaction costs is still attractive. Simple transaction cost mitigation approaches could further enhance the performance of the integrated approach by reducing portfolio turnover. Consistent with behavioural models, limits to arbitrage and information asymmetry play a significant role in explaining the super performance of this integrated approach.
Integrating technology into higher education: A case study in Lebanon

The higher education sector in Lebanon has undergone significant changes in the past twenty years, with a rapid increase in the number of higher education institutions that differ greatly in their missions, methodologies, and regulations. One of the remarkable differences between higher education institutions (HEI) in Lebanon is their vision and adaptation of technology into their institutions, with the lack of any government rules that guide HEIs to proper technology implementation strategies. While some institutions use international standards and models for quality assurance and management as a base for technology integration, others implement their own strategies of choosing and applying the technologies they deem appropriate. In this paper, we study the effect of technology adaptation strategies on HEIs in Lebanon, and propose a model for technology integration in higher education, based on the current needs and status of the Lebanese higher education system. We build our model on the goals of achieving and assuring high quality in the pedagogy, business, and technology sectors in the HEI.
An FSK Inductive-Coupling Transceiver Using 60mV 0.64fJ/bit 0.0016mm2 Load-Modulated Transmitter and LC-Oscillator-Based Receiver in 65nm CMOS for Energy-Budget-Unbalanced Application

BRIEF PAPER Special Section on Analog Circuits and Their Application Technologies An FSK Inductive-Coupling Transceiver Using 60 mV 0.64 fJ/bit 0.0016 mm2 Load-Modulated Transmitter and LC-Oscillator-Based Receiver in 65 nm CMOS for Energy-Budget-Unbalanced Application Kenya HAYASHI†a), Shigeki ARATA†, Ge XU†, Shunya MURAKAMI†, Cong Dang BUI†, Nonmembers, Atsuki KOBAYASHI†, Student Member, and Kiichi NIITSU†,††, Member
Temperature characteristic and compensation algorithm for a marine high accuracy piezoresistive pressure sensor

Pressure sensor used in marine hydrographic survey is an important device for the deep sea detection, the tsunami forecast and the marine engineering. Owing to its mature technology process and low production cost, silicon piezoresistive sensor is widely applied in the field of industrial pressure measurement. However, its temperature effect can result in non-negligible dynamic error, which cannot meet requirement of deep sea environment. The silicon-on-sapphire pressure sensor based on stress cup structure is presented. The output voltage values show a high deviation in the range of −6∼50°C due to temperature drift. In order to minimise this temperature effect, a temperature compensation algorithm is proposed to realise 0.03% accuracy in the full scale 60 MPa range. Compared with a reference commercial sensor in deep sea experiment, the test pressure sensors exhibit minor error, excellent similarity and coherence. This numerical method provides a new research direction for environmental self-adaptive sensor. It can be emphasised that this sensor will have a good application prospect in unattended long-term ocean observation system.
On the Application of IoT: Meteorological Information Display System Based on LoRa Wireless Communication

ABSTRACT Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have tremendous applications in a variety of industrial and the public Internet of Things (IoT) where information can be delivered through embedded and networked devices. In this paper, we propose a new architecture underlining IoT realm and we implement a long-range (LoRa) wireless radio-based information display system. In particular, using the commercially available LoRa™, we develop WSN infrastructures by using microcontroller to manage the required data from and to a 3G gateway as well as the LoRa™ nodes. Meteorological information is crucial in various aspects of life, so is in the field of agriculture. Lack of access to good information technology infrastructure in the rural region of developing countries has deprived farmers of timely weather information and which can cause significant losses in production and economy. Thus, this paper describes our work on the real-time implementation of a LoRa-based network. The work is mainly intended for rural farmers of developing countries considering the realization of IoT, information and communication technology. The proposed system is able to wirelessly deliver well-timed and valuable information for farmers across the country to boost productivity and minimize needless wastes before, during and after the harvesting period. Furthermore, in this study we proved the functionality of the entire WSN infrastructure by testing data transmission–reception in a non-line of sight environment among the gateway and LoRa™ transceiver nodes considering both indoor-to-outdoor and outdoor-to-outdoor scenarios.
CHERI: a RISC capability machine for practical memory safety

This work presents CHERI, a practical extension of the 64-bit MIPS instruction set to support capabilities for fine-grained memory protection. Traditional paged memory protection has proved inadequate in the face of escalating security threats and proposed solutions include fine-grained protection tables (Mondrian Memory Protection) and hardware fatpointer protection (Hardbound). These have emphasised transparent protection for C executables but have lacked flexibility and practicality. Intel’s recent memory protection extensions (iMPX) attempt to adopt some of these ideas and are flexible and optional but lack the strict correctness of these proposals. Capability addressing has been the classical solution to efficient and strong memory protection but it has been thought to be incompatible with common instruction sets and also with modern program structure which uses a flat memory space with global pointers. CHERI is a fusion of capabilities with a paged flat memory producing a program-managed fat pointer capability model. This protection mechanism scales from application sandboxing to efficient byte-level memory safety with per-pointer permissions. I present an extension to the 64-bit MIPS architecture on FPGA that runs standard FreeBSD and supports self-segmenting applications in user space. Unlike other recent proposals, the CHERI implementation is open-source and of sufficient quality to support software development as well as community extension of this work. I compare with published memory safety mechanisms and demonstrate competitive performance while providing assurance and greater flexibility with simpler hardware requirements.
How to reduce carbon emissions of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by knowledge sharing in China

Abstract Small and medium-sized enterprises are important components of the economy worldwide, and they are considered to be responsible for a large part of carbon emissions. However, because of the limitations in resource, knowledge and technical capabilities, most SMEs are confronting environmental issues such as the negative spillovers. The policy costs of an administrative order that is effective to promote emission reductions of large enterprises in China’s current economy could be high, and therefore, it is essential and crucial to establish a market-driven mechanism to help and encourage SMEs to make environmental improvement regarding the cap-and-trade system. In this context, new patterns of emission reduction would have profound impacts on knowledge management (KM) of SMEs, especially on knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer. In this paper, we adopt a micro-model to study the behaviors and carbon emissions of SMEs under different scenarios. We find that both trading and sharing of knowledge on carbon emission reduction are conducive to reducing emissions of SMEs in the context of cap-and-trade. Besides, the more the compensation is granted, the more manufacturing firms are willing to share knowledge with partners who have complementary knowledge. Subsidies or rewards on knowledge sharing can be helpful to reduce carbon emission, which may have important implications for public policy to solve the problem of carbon emission reduction of SMEs.
Ventral tegmental area neurons use an ensemble code for representing information about ongoing actions

Affiliations: Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, 450 Technology Drive Suite 223, Pittsburgh, PA 15219. Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, Psychology Building 400 Innovation Drive, Memphis, TN 38152 Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, 132 Baker Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, 4400 5 Ave, Pittsburgh PA, 15213 Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Gates Hillman Center 8203, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Department of Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh, A210 Langley Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
A rolling horizon simulation approach for managing demand with lead time variability

This paper proposes a rolling horizon (RH) approach to deal with management problems under dynamic demand in planning horizons with variable lead times using system dynamics (SD) simulation. Thus, the nature of dynamic RH solutions entails no inconveniences to contemplate planning horizons with unpredictable demands. This is mainly because information is periodically updated and replanning is done in time. Therefore, inventory and logistic costs may be lower. For the first time, an RH is applied for demand management with variable lead times along with SD simulation models, which allowed the use of lot-sizing techniques to be evaluated (Wagner-Whitin and Silver-Meal). The basic scenario is based on a real-world example from an automotive single-level SC composed of a first-tier supplier and a car assembler that contemplates uncertain demands while planning the RH and 216 subscenarios by modifying constant and variable lead times, holding costs and order costs, combined with lot-sizing techniques. Twenty-eight more replications comprising 504 new subscenarios with variable lead times are generated to represent a relative variation coefficient of the initial demand. We conclude that our RH simulation approach, along with lot-sizing techniques, can generate more sustainable planning results in total costs, fill rates and bullwhip effect terms.
Link maintenance and channel evaluation techniques for HF radiocommunication links

Methods for estimating the prevailing channel characteristics for use in an automatic modem waveform selection management system for high frequency (HF) radio circuits are addressed in this thesis. Current techniques for channel evaluation and management are reviewed in detail and their limitations noted. Various channel probe signals are considered including Barker sequences, long sequences found by means of neural network methods, modified Legendre sequences and a sequence which forms part of the STANAG-4285 waveform. Experiments have been undertaken in which the new methods of channel probing are evaluated and compared with those currently in use. A prototype system that automatically changes the modem data rate based on measured frame error rate is demonstrated. This system can significantly improve data throughputs compared with fixed data rate systems. The use of in-built or add-on channel probing methods that do not require breaks in the data transmission are promoted over dedicated probing methods which require a break in the normal data communication signal. The concept of reducing the relative amplitude of an add-on probe (and hence improve the SNIR) by using a signal cancelling technique at the receiver is introduced. Finally, recommendations for additional work necessary to realise an automated modem waveform management system to complement existing frequency management systems are made.
Efficient active object detection with deformable parts model

This project aimed to develop a more principled way of selecting the best object hypotheses in the multiscale, deformable parts model of Felzenszwalb et al. (MDPM) [10], drawing inspiration from the Hough Forest detector of Gall and Lempitsky [13], and its probabilistic extension by Barinova et al. [4]. The focus was on how to build a meaningful bipartite graph between some set of evidence elements and the set of hypotheses of object locations/configurations, so the problem of picking the best possible set of detections can be solved using submodular maximization of an objective function over that set. We show several alternatives of how to use the information provided by the MDPM for building such a graph. The proposed greedy detector operates directly on the response maps of the filters of the MDPM, taking them as a representation of vote weights from the evidence elements (positions in the image) to the hypotheses described by their location, size and type. The induced objective function is analogous to the one in [4] an can be solved with the iterative greedy algorithm for submodular maximization. Tests using the PASCAL VOC dataset showed that this approach performs well without needing a subsequent nonmaximum suppression step, and can deal with high levels of overlap between object instances. The second part of the project explores the active detection task, where the detection algorithm receives feedback from experts after each iteration. Thus, it is necessary to account for true (active) and false (inactive) detections accordingly. This work proposes several objective functions for the active case, modeling them as a computation of coverage of edges in the bipartite graph of voting elements and hypotheses, where the goal is to cover most of the graph as quickly as possible. The functions are formally shown to comply with the required mathematical properties of monotonicity and submodularity. In the positive case, coverage is based on the overlaps between voting windows (which define neighboring edges), while in the negative case coverage is based on the similarity of edges. Initial tests indicated that further research is needed for specific parts of the system, but the approach is theoretically sound.
Attenuation Relationship for Peak Horizontal Acceleration of Strong Ground Motion of Uttarakhand Region of Central Himalayas

ABSTRACT An attenuation relationship has been developed for Uttarakhand, a state of Republic of India (part of central Himalayas) by using the records of earthquakes occurred in the region in the past by strong ground motion networks of U.P. array, project “National strong motion Instrumentation network” and network of project “Earthquake early warning system for Northern India”. Uttarakhand region lies in the central seismic gap where scientists have estimated that a large-sized earthquake is overdue. Largest peak ground acceleration of two horizontal components of total 116 records of 9 earthquakes (5.0≤ Mw≤6.8) are used in the development of the new relationship. Two-step stratified regression model is chosen. The proposed attenuation relationship is: where A is peak horizontal acceleration in g of strong ground motion, M is magnitude and X is hypocentral distance from the source. The standard error ( ) of the proposed relationship is 0.281. The developed attenuation relationship will be useful for site specific studies, seismic hazard estimation and other engineering applications. The attenuation relationship can be further upgraded with the availability of earthquake records in future.
Effect of TiO2 Addition on Mortars: Characterization and Photoactivity

In this study, mortar specimens were prepared with a cement:sand:water ratio of 1:3:0.5, in accordance with standard EN196-1. Portland CEM I 52.5 R grey (G) and white (W) cements were used, together with normalised sand and distilled water. Different amounts of TiO2 photocatalyst were incorporated in the preparation of the mortar samples. The effect of the addition of TiO2 was studied on mechanical properties of the mortar and cement including compressive and flexural strength, consistency (the flow table test), setting time and carbonation. Characterization techniques, including thermogravimetry, mercury porosimetry and X-ray diffraction spectroscopy (XRD), were applied to study the physico-chemical properties of the mortars. It was shown that adding the photocatalyst to the mortar had no negative effect on its properties and could be used to accelerate the setting process. Specimen photoactivity with the incorporated photocatalyst was tested for NOx oxidation in different conditions of humidity (0% RH and 65% RH) and illumination (Vis or Vis/UV), with the results showing an important activity even under Vis radiation.