Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy of Non-nuclear Methods Used for Hot Mix Asphalt Density Determination

This paper presents research efforts with a major purpose of determining if electromagnetic, non-nuclear density gauges (NNDG) are competent enough for asphalt density measurement in comparison to the already existing standard core method (AASHTO T-166). Field, as well as laboratory studies, were conducted to assess the abilities of available non-nuclear devices as they need the appraisal for future use in many developing countries including Pakistan. NNDG data collected from 45 locations, compared to density determined in the laboratory for the cores extracted from the same location, shows that the results obtained from both the methods are comparable. Laboratory studies conducted on the slabs of open and dense gradations show that such an instrument performed well for dense gradation in comparison to open ones. The Calibration effect of the instrument has a valuable impact on the accurate density determination. Results indicated that such gauges are seriously affected by moisture presence on the surface of testing pavement. Moreover, the temperature dependency of non-nuclear gauges is among the major outcome of this research. Overall the performance of such gauges is valuable, and the results are comparable to the standard results of core methods. However, these results can only be used for Quality Assurance (Q.A) purposes and not for Quality Acceptance (Q.C) of the density of pavement.
A Matrix-Less Model for Tracing Software Requirements to Source Code

—Requirements traceability, regardless of the process used to produce a software system (e.g., traditional or agile development process), is a highly desirable quality attribute for the resulting software product. Building a Requirements Trace-ability Matrix (RTM) for a software product, which is the basis for existing approaches to achieving requirements traceability, works well with traditional software development where a more formal requirements process is in place. However, with the wide industry adoption of agile development methodologies, where requirements are captured and communicated through informal channels, the applicability of existing traceability approaches to agile software projects has been strongly restricted. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the area of requirements trace-ability and present a matrix-less model to achieving requirements traceability that is equally applicable to both agile and traditional software development.
The flat mites of the genus Tenuipalpus Donnadieu (Acari: Tenuipalpidae) from Iran

Tenuipalpus shishehbouri sp. nov., collected from pomegranate trees (Punica granatum, Lythraceae), is described from Darab, Fars Province, Iran. Six species are re-described: Tenuipalpus daneshvari Khosrowshahi and Arbabi, Tenuipalpus euonymi Khosrowshahi, Tenuipalpus granati Sayed, Tenuipalpus kamalii Khosrowshahi and Arbabi, Tenuipalpus parsii Khosrowshahi and Arbabi and Tenuipalpus punicae Pritchard and Baker. A key to all known Iranian species is provided. http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:40C1657A-8ED8-4840-82B0-02427D54C967
Within-lake detection of the effects of tourist activities in the littoral zone of oligotrophic dune lakes

Abstract Intensive recreational use of oligotrophic lakes can lead to increases in epilimnetic nutrient concentrations (through direct inputs from urine or re-suspension of sediments) and the development of undesirable algal blooms. Despite these adverse ecological responses to tourist activities, many lake monitoring programs do not address tourist nutrient inputs at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. This paper presents results of investigations aimed at detecting the effects of nutrient inputs to perched dune lakes on Fraser Island, principally through within-lake comparisons of nutrient and algal variables. Nutrient concentrations and algal biomass were measured in heavily visited (disturbed) and inaccessible (reference) sites within five perched dune lakes on Fraser Island, Australia, during the summer of 1999/2000. Whilst nutrient and phytoplankton chlorophyll a concentrations did not differ between sites, periphyton chlorophyll a concentrations were occasionally significantly higher in disturbed sites than in reference sites, particularly in the very popular clear lakes, suggesting that algal growth may be enhanced by tourist activities. Experimental manipulations of nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in algal (phytoplankton and periphyton) bioassays were undertaken in each lake over the 2000/2001 summer, to assess algal responses to nutrient additions. The response of phytoplankton communities to nutrient additions varied greatly between lakes, with evidence of limitation or co-limitation by nitrogen and phosphorus in all systems. Periphyton biomass showed similar trends to phytoplankton in some lakes, but these were not significant. Nutrients added to lakes by tourists are likely to be rapidly assimilated by littoral zone periphyton communities in these oligotrophic lakes. As a result, impacts of tourism are not likely to be detected by traditional measurements of open water nutrient and phytoplankton chlorophyll a concentrations. Instead, measurement of periphyton growth and/or biomass (chlorophyll a) in the littoral zone might be the most spatially and temporally relevant indicator of tourist impacts in these lakes.
Cmr Assignments of the Securinine Alkaloids

The cmr spectrum of securinine (11, allosecurinine (2), and their boro- hydride reduction products (3 and 4) have been assigned on the basis of lanthanide shift experi- ments and specific deuteration. The securinine alkaloids comprise a group of about a dozen alkaloids sharing a unique ring structure and biosynthesis (1,2). It has recently been demonstrated that securinine is a stereospecific GABA, receptor antagonist of restricted conformation (3), making it a useful tool for understanding GABA receptor topography. It was therefore of interest to assign the cmr spectra in this series in order to facilitate identification of new alkaloids and to understand better the limited conformational mobility of the alkaloids. Single-frequency off-resonance decoupling (SFORD) experiments were of limited utility in assigning resonances because the respective methylene, methine, and quater- nary carbon resonances occurred in closely spaced groups that could not be completely assigned without further experimental techniques. The lanthanide shift reagent Eu(fod), provided invaluable information, and the trends in chemical shifts throughout the series were correlated with conformation predicted by MM2 molecular mechanics calculations. Specific deuteration was helpful in assigning the resonances of dihy- drosecurinine (3). Finally, the previously assigned spectrum of indolizidine (4) pro- vided confirmation. Assignments are tabulated in Table 1 for securinine (l), al- losecurinine (2), 14,15-dihydrosecurinine (3), and 14,15-dihydroallosecurinine (4): Detailed comparisons ofpredicted and observed shifts are not presented for all cases, be- cause a simple graphical comparison of the induced shifts of each set of two or three am- biguous resonances gave identical asignments. The distance term (r3) in the McCon- nell-Robertson equation (5,7) is dominant over the angle term (cos 2 8) for the sec- urinine alkaloid structures.
LENGTH-WEIGHT RELATIONSHIPS OF FIVE FRESHWATER FISH SPECIES FROM THE HATAY PROVINCE, TURKEY

Length–weight relationships of freshwater fish species which are Carasobarbus luteus, Chondrostoma regium, Clarias gariepinus, Anguilla anguilla and Cyprinus carpio from the Hatay province, Turkey were investigated. Values of the parameter “b” of length-weigth reltionships (W=aLb) ranged from 2.767 to 3.282.
Ameliorating effect of royal jelly on viability and longevity of frozen-thawed buffalo spermatozoa

Cryopreserved buffalo semen is generally acknowledged to have an impaired fertility by comparison with fresh semen. The reduction arises from both a lower viability post-thaw and sublethal dysfunction in a proportion of the surviving subpopulation. Thus, the present study was conducted to observe the effect of addition of royal jelly on subsequent survival and acrosomal integrity of buffalo spermatozoa during post-thawing incubation. Frozen-thawed semen samples were washed in Tris extender containing different concentrations of royal jelly (RJ): 0.0 control, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5%. Spermatozoa motility and viability in addition acrosomal integrity of thawed samples were assessed after thawing and at 30 min intervals during incubation at 37°C for 120 min. Results of experiment showed that the percentages of sperm function parameters were improved with an increase of royal jelly in Tris extender from 0.0 to 0.4% (P < 0.05). Statistical analysis for sperm motility and viability in addition acrosomal integrity (Tables 1, 2, 3) showed that best results (significant higher P < 0.05) occurred with RJ doses of 0.4 and 0.5% especially at 30-60 min incubation periods than that control. Therefore, the addition of 0.4% of royal jelly in Tris extender is recommended for dilution of thawed semen. These results indicated that addition of 0.4% RJ to Tris-buffer enhance and maintain the viability and longevity of buffalo spermatozoa for a long period and this additive can be used for increasing the possibility of collision between spermatozoa and ova during insemination.
Seasonal changes of planktonic polychaete larvae and chlorophyll a concentration in Onagawa Bay, northeastern Japan

Abstract Seasonal changes of abundance and composition of planktonic polychaete larvae were investigated monthly from January 2007 to December 2009 in Onagawa Bay, northeastern Japan. Larvae belonging to 18 families were identified: Spionidae, Serpulidae, Nephtyidae, Magelonidae, Phyllodocidae, Polynoidae, Syllidae, Capitellidae, Nereididae, Terebellidae, Arenicolidae, Chaetopteridae, Oweniidae, Pectinariidae, Glyceridae, Dorvilleidae, Sabellidae, and Lumbrineridae. The density of polychaete larvae varied from 18 to 6901 ind m−3. Spionid larvae occurred throughout the year, being the dominant family throughout the year, comprising 88.7% of the total, with those belonging to genus Polydora dominant during winter to spring and Pseudopolydora during summer to autumn. Larvae belonging to the Serpulidae, Magelonidae, Nephtyidae, Phyllodocidae, and Polynoidae tended to be frequent in summer and autumn. The close timing between phytoplankton blooms and the production of planktonic polychaete larvae is discussed, and it is noted that most planktonic polychaete larvae tended to synchronize with summer phytoplankton increases and autumn blooms in the near-surface water, but not with spring blooms. One possible explanation is the diversity of food during summer to autumn in Onagawa Bay. Only larvae belonging to the genus Polydora were synchronized with spring phytoplankton blooms, perhaps reflecting their northern biogeographic origin.
SLIC-UAV: A Method for monitoring recovery in tropical restoration projects through identification of signature species using UAVs

Logged forests cover four million square kilometres of the tropics and restoring these forests is essential if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, yet monitoring recovery is challenging. Tracking the abundance of visually identifiable, early-successional species enables successional status and thereby restoration progress to be evaluated. Here we present a new pipeline, SLIC-UAV, for processing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery to map early-successional species in tropical forests. The pipeline is novel because it comprises: (a) a time-efficient approach for labelling crowns from UAV imagery; (b) machine learning of species based on spectral and textural features within individual tree crowns, and (c) automatic segmentation of orthomosaiced UAV imagery into 'superpixels', using Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC). Creating superpixels reduces the dataset's dimensionality and focuses prediction onto clusters of pixels, greatly improving accuracy. To demonstrate SLIC-UAV, support vector machines and random forests were used to predict the species of hand-labelled crowns in a restoration concession in Indonesia. Random forests were most accurate at discriminating species for whole crowns, with accuracy ranging from 79.3% when mapping five common species, to 90.5% when mapping the three most visually-distinctive species. In contrast, support vector machines proved better for labelling automatically segmented superpixels, with accuracy ranging from 74.3% to 91.7% for the same species. Models were extended to map species across 100 hectares of forest. The study demonstrates the power of SLIC-UAV for mapping characteristic early-successional tree species as an indicator of successional stage within tropical forest restoration areas. Continued effort is needed to develop easy-to-implement and low-cost technology to improve the affordability of project management.
From bad to worse: airline boarding changes in response to COVID-19

Airlines have introduced a back-to-front boarding process in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is motivated by the desire to reduce passengers' likelihood of passing close to seated passengers when they take their seats. However, our prior work on the risk of Ebola spread in aeroplanes suggested that the driving force for increased exposure to infection transmission risk is the clustering of passengers while waiting for others to stow their luggage and take their seats. In this work, we examine whether the new boarding processes lead to increased or decreased risk of infection spread. We also study the reasons behind the risk differences associated with different boarding processes. We accomplish this by simulating the new boarding processes using pedestrian dynamics and compare them against alternatives. Our results show that back-to-front boarding roughly doubles the infection exposure compared with random boarding. It also increases exposure by around 50% compared to a typical boarding process prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. While keeping middle seats empty yields a substantial reduction in exposure, our results show that the different boarding processes have similar relative strengths in this case as with middle seats occupied. We show that the increased exposure arises from the proximity between passengers moving in the aisle and while seated. Such exposure can be reduced significantly by prohibiting the use of overhead bins to stow luggage. Our results suggest that the new boarding procedures increase the risk of exposure to COVID-19 compared with prior ones and are substantially worse than a random boarding process.
Discrete spacetime symmetries and particle mixing in non-Hermitian scalar quantum field theories

We discuss second quantization, discrete symmetry transformations and inner products in non-Hermitian scalar quantum field theories with PT symmetry, focusing on a prototype model of two complex scalar fields with anti-Hermitian mass mixing. Whereas the definition of the inner product is unique for theories described by Hermitian Hamiltonians, it is not unique for theories with non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. Energy eigenstates are not orthogonal with respect to the conventional Dirac inner product, and the PT inner product does not correspond to a positive-definite norm. We clarify the relationship between canonical-conjugate operators and introduce a further discrete symmetry C', previously introduced for quantum-mechanical systems, and show that the C'PT inner product does yield a positive-definite norm, and hence is appropriate for defining the Fock space in non-Hermitian models with PT symmetry in terms of energy eigenstates. We also discuss similarity transformations between PT-symmetric non-Hermitian scalar quantum field theories and Hermitian theories, showing that they are not in general equivalent in the presence of interactions. As an illustration of our discussion, we compare particle mixing in a Hermitian theory and in the corresponding non-Hermitian model with PT symmetry, showing how the latter maintains unitarity and exhibits mixing between scalar and pseudoscalar bosons.
Uso de gemas de ovos de aves hiperimunizadas contra Escherichia coli suína no controle da diarréia neonatal de leitões

The effect of yolks from birds hipperimmunized birds against Escherichia coli (E. coli) pathogenic for swine on the passive immunity of newborn piglets in a producer unit of piglets was studied. It was evaluated ELISA optical density (OD) of antibodies against E. coli, body weight and the frequency of diarrhea (FcD) in 137 newborn piglets born from 25 primiparous gilts non-vaccinated against E. coli. The gilts were considered blocks. From each gilt, six piglets from both sexes were separated, excluded the lighter and the heavier ones, and divided into three treatments and two replications. The treatments were supplied orally, as follows: T1: 2 mL of PBS (control treatment) in 2 doses, the first was given at birth and the second 2 hours later; T2: 2 mL of yolks with titer of 100,000 of antibodies (IgY) against E. coli in the same two doses; T3: equal to T2, followed by 2 mL of yolks every 3 days until piglets reached 12 days old. Old two blood samples were collected from 1 piglet/treatment/gilt: 24 hours after birth and when piglets were 14 days old. The ammount of IgY against E. coli in the serum of piglets was also determined by ELISA. The OD for T2 and T3 was significantly higher in the first 24 hours and 14 days after birth compared to the control . T3, T2 and T1 remained 87, 79 and 73% of the studied period without diarrhea. Due to the lower FcD percentage, T3 piglets were significantly heavier than T1, but did not differ from T2. The results of this study pointed out that the supply of hipperimmunized hen yolks against E. coli acts effectively in diarrhea prevention and that the continuous supply is more effective than the supply only at birth.
Learning a Unified Sample Weighting Network for Object Detection

Region sampling or weighting is significantly important to the success of modern region-based object detectors. Unlike some previous works, which only focus on ``hard'' samples when optimizing the objective function, we argue that sample weighting should be data-dependent and task-dependent. The importance of a sample for the objective function optimization is determined by its uncertainties to both object classification and bounding box regression tasks. To this end, we devise a general loss function to cover most region-based object detectors with various sampling strategies, and then based on it we propose a unified sample weighting network to predict a sample's task weights. Our framework is simple yet effective. It leverages the samples' uncertainty distributions on classification loss, regression loss, IoU, and probability score, to predict sample weights. Our approach has several advantages: (i). It jointly learns sample weights for both classification and regression tasks, which differentiates it from most previous work. (ii). It is a data-driven process, so it avoids some manual parameter tuning. (iii). It can be effortlessly plugged into most object detectors and achieves noticeable performance improvements without affecting their inference time. Our approach has been thoroughly evaluated with recent object detection frameworks and it can consistently boost the detection accuracy. Code has been made available at https://github.com/caiqi/sample-weighting-network.
Global dynamics below the ground states for NLS under partial harmonic confinement

We are concerned with the global behavior of the solutions of the focusing mass supercritical nonlinear Schrodinger equation under partial harmonic confinement. We establish a necessary and sufficient condition on the initial data below the ground states to determine the global behavior (blow-up/scattering) of the solution. Our proof of scattering is based on the varia-tional characterization of the ground states, localized virial estimates, linear profile decomposition and nonlinear profiles.
Peter Pan discs: finding Neverland’s parameters

Peter Pan discs are a recently discovered class of long-lived discs around low-mass stars that survive for an order of magnitude longer than typical discs. In this paper, we use disc evolutionary models to determine the required balance between initial conditions and the magnitude of dispersal processes for Peter Pan discs to be primordial. We find that we require low transport (α ∼ 10−4), extremely low external photoevaporation (${\le}10^{-9}\, {\rm M}_{\odot }\, {\rm yr^{-1}}$), and relatively high disc masses (>0.25M*) to produce discs with ages and accretion rates consistent with Peter Pan discs. Higher transport (α = 10−3) results in disc lifetimes that are too short and even lower transport (α = 10−5) leads to accretion rates smaller than those observed. The required external photoevaporation rates are so low that primordial Peter Pan discs will have formed in rare environments on the periphery of low-mass star-forming regions, or deeply embedded, and as such have never subsequently been exposed to higher amounts of UV radiation. Given that such an external photoevaporation scenario is rare, the required disc parameters and accretion properties may reflect the initial conditions and accretion rates of a much larger fraction of the discs around low-mass stars.
Electron pairing induced by repulsive interactions in tunable one-dimensional platforms

We present a scheme comprised of a one-dimensional system with repulsive interactions, in which the formation of bound pairs can take place in an easily tunable this http URL capacitively coupling a primary electronic quantum wire of interest to a secondary strongly-correlated fermionic system, the intrinsic electron-electron repulsion may be overcome, promoting the formation of bound electron pairs in the primary wire. The intrinsic repulsive interactions tend to favor the formation of charge density waves of these pairs, yet we find that superconducting correlations are dominant in a limited parameter regime. Our analysis show that the paired phase is stabilized in an intermediate region of phase space, encompassed by two additional phases: a decoupled phase, where the primary wire remains gapless, and a trion phase, where a primary electron pair binds a charge carrier from the secondary system. Tuning the strength of the primary-secondary interaction, as well as the chemical potential of the secondary system, one can control the different phase transitions. Our approach takes into account the interactions among the secondary degrees of freedom, and strongly relies on their highly correlated nature. Extension of our proposal to two dimensions is discussed, and the conditions for a long-range superconducting order from repulsion only are found. Our physical description, given by a simple model with a minimal amount of ingredients, may help to shed some light on pairing mechanism in various low-dimensional strongly correlated materials.
Peroxidase isozyme profiles of immature and mature pollen of seven tropical plants from eastern India

Peroxidase isozyme profiles of the pollen collected from the immature and mature anthers (before and after anthesis) of seven tropical plant taxa from eastern India were studied in order to understand the development of Peroxidase isozyme activity with the maturity of the pollen. Considerable variation in the enzyme profiles was observed in all cases, except in Saccharum spontaneum with the individual isoforms showing a tendency to increase in their concentration and staining properties and with the simultaneous appearance of new bands, in certain cases, on maturity. Saccharum spontaneum showed no variation in its isozyme profile even on maturity.