Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Collection and evaluation of indigenous buck semen at the coastal region of Bangladesh

Evaluation of semen characteristics is an important and prior for semen preservation. The aim of this study was to collection and evaluation of indigenous buck semen in the coastal region of Bangladesh. The semen was collected from bucks through artificial vagina method. The colour, odour, volume, viscosity, mass activity, consistency, concentration and individual sperm motility were analysed and recorded after collection from pre-selected four bucks. The colour and odour of all buck (B) semen were creamy white to milky white and fishy smell, respectively. In this study, we found that the average volume of B-1, B-2, B-3 and B-4 were 0.74, 0.98, 0.42 and 0.60 ml, respectively. The average grading of viscosity of B-1, B-2, B-3 and B-4 were 3.2, 3.8, 2.6 and 3.0, respectively. The average grading of mass activity of B-1, B-2, B-3 and B-4 were 3.6, 3.2, 2.4 and 3.4, respectively. The consistency of B-1, B-2, B-3 and B-4 were 4.2, 4.8, 2.8 and 4.0, respectively. The concentration of B-1, B-2, B-3 and B-4 were 1.58, 1.94, 0.62 and 1.54 ×109 per ml of semen volume. The average percentage of individual sperm motility of B-1, B-2, B-3 and B-4 were 81, 71, 66 and 80%, respectively. Viscosity, mass activity, consistency, concentration and individual sperm motility were significantly (p < 0.05) correlate with each other. It may be concluded that the data about semen of the bucks are in acceptable level for preservation. Further study will be designed for the evaluation of viability and motility of sperm before and after freezing as liquid semen.
Photosynthesis, Yield, Nutrient Availability and Soil Properties after Biochar, Zeolites or Mycorrhizal Inoculum Application to a Mature Rainfed Olive Orchard

Soil conditioners and beneficial microorganisms are important tools that can be used to increase the sustainability of agro-systems. However, the high diversity of conditions where they can be applied may influence the results, which requires extensive field research. In this study, a field trial of four years was conducted in olive (Olea europaea L.) to assess the effect of biochar, zeolites and a commercial mycorrhizal inoculum in the photosynthetic performance, nutritional status of trees, olive yield and soil properties. The experimental design also included a fertilizer treatment with nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K) and boron (B), which nutrients were applied at 50 kg ha−1 of N, P2O5 and K2O and 2 kg ha−1 of B, and an untreated control. The mineral fertilizer treatment increased significantly the dry mass of pruning wood and the average olive yield by 21% over the control treatment. The mineral treatment increased plant N nutritional status, the most likely reason why the trees of this treatment performed better. Overall, the soil treatments had net photosynthetic rates similar to each other and higher than the control treatment, from the second year onwards. Biochar increased soil organic matter, as a result of the carbon (C) contained in the amendment itself, and probably by stimulating soil biological activity. Biochar and zeolites did not improve the productive performances of the tress, but increased the soil cation exchange capacity (CEC), which can benefit the system in the long-term. Mycorrhizal fungi did not show any benefit for soil or plants, which could mean that mycorrhization was not established, or their effect was not better than that of native microorganisms. In the conditions of this study, the interest of using commercial mycorrhizal fungi in a mature olive orchard seems to be low.
DETERMINANTS OF FINANCIAL WELLNESS OF RURAL HOUSEHOLDS IN THE HILL DISTRICTS OF UTTARAKHAND: AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH

The study examines significant contributors to financial wellness for rural households in the hill districts of Uttarakhand. The study takes a sample of 666 respondents through multi-stage stratified random sampling from Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and Cooperatives members, and all are small and marginal farmers. A field survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire. Except for financial knowledge and numeracy, all other constructs, such as cash management, savings behavior, risk-credit management, financial attitudes, and financial wellness, were measured on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) were conducted on 628 valid samples using SPSS 23 and AMOS 23. The results from the analysis revealed that cash management, savings behavior, and financial attitudes significantly contribute to financial wellness. The study found that households have the reasonable financial knowledge and financial numeracy skills. The study also found that savings behavior has a mediating effect on the relationship between cash management and financial wellness. The study is useful for rural development stakeholders and policymakers to strategically focus on financial inclusion programs.
Comparative Effects Between the Commercial and Homemade Curcuma on HCT116 Adenocarcinoma Cell Line

Cancer is the major leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the world. In fact, colorectal cancer (CRC) is the most frequent type of cancer in the world and it is the second most common type of cancer in both genders (women: 10.1%; men: 12.4%) [1]. Several data showed that the number of newly diagnosed CRC cases continues to grow especially in the developing countries [2]. For several years, Tunisia has had a low incidence of CRC that seems very far from developed countries, but significant variation in colorectal cancer incidence rates and trends have been observed in our country, without a consistent screening program. The predicted CRC incidence rate by 2024 should be 39.3/100,000 for males and 22.9/ 100,000 for females [3]. Natural products from plants have been intensively explored to find compounds providing against a large number of diseases associated to cancer. The Mediterranean kitchen is one of the most known, and contains a unique mixture of flavors, tastes and nutrients that have no equal around the world [4]. The Tunisian kitchen is a good example. Actually, the Romans and Carthaginians, and well before them the Greeks, brought a lot of recipes and left for us a huge traditional food heritage. This kitchen is reputed for its proper combination that has never been elaborated. It is characterized by a special use of herbs and aromatic plants [5], and Curcuma is one of these spices. It is widely Abstract Background: Curcuma longa is widely used for its ability to inhibit carcinogenesis and the capacity to exert a chemo-preventive effect in different types of cancers including colorectal cancer. While our food habits have changed, the prevalence of colorectal cancer have not stopped increasing.
BitCluster: Fine-Grained Weight Quantization for Load-Balanced Bit-Serial Neural Network Accelerators

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has demonstrated great success in pattern recognition scenarios at the cost of nearly billions of parameters and consequent convolution operations. Various dedicated hardware designs are proposed to accelerate the CNN computation in more energy-efficient manners. Especially, the bit-serial accelerator (BSA) is one of the most effective approaches on resource-limited platforms by eliminating zero-bit computations. However, the irregular distribution and varying number of effectual (nonzero) bits in weights significantly cause hardware underutilization, impeding further performance improvement of state-of-the-art BSAs. To address this issue, BitCluster, a hardware-friendly quantization method, is proposed to make each weight with the identical number of effectual bits for load-balanced computation. Considering distinct sensitivities to weight precision in different neural layers, layer-level BitCluster is proposed to design further for fine-grained weight quantization. It systematically determines the layerwise quantization configurations, which significantly improve the overall performance with <1% accuracy loss. BitCluster is comprehensively evaluated on a BitCluster-compatible BSA design by taking six mainstream CNN models as benchmarks. The experimental results show that the BitCluster-based BSA achieves <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.6\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> higher hardware utilization and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.4\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> speedup on average than state-of-the-art BSAs, with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> better energy efficiency on average.
Extrinsic Self-Calibration of the Surround-View System: A Weakly Supervised Approach

An SVS usually consists of four wide-angle fisheye cameras mounted around the vehicle to sense the surrounding environment. From the images synchronously captured by cameras, a top-down surround-view can be synthesized, on the premise that both intrinsics and extrinsics of the cameras have been calibrated. At present, the intrinsic calibration approach is relatively complete and can be pipelined, while the extrinsic calibration is still immature. To fill such a research gap, we propose a novel extrinsic self-calibration scheme which follows a weakly supervised framework, namely WESNet (Weakly-supervised Extrinsic Self-calibration Network). The training of WESNet consists of two stages. First, we utilize the corners in a few calibration site images as the weak supervision to roughly optimize the network by minimizing the geometric loss. Then, after the convergence in the first stage, we additionally introduce a self-supervised photometric loss term that can be constructed by the photometric information from natural images for further fine-tuning. Besides, to support training, we totally collected 19,078 groups of synchronously captured fisheye images under various environmental conditions. To our knowledge, thus far this is the largest surround-view dataset containing original fisheye images. By means of learning prior knowledge from the training data, WESNet takes the original fisheye images synchronously collected as the input, and directly yields extrinsics end-to-end with little labor cost. Its efficiency and efficacy have been corroborated by extensive experiments conducted on our collected dataset. To make our results reproducible, source code and the collected dataset have been released.1
An Efficient Method for Facial Sketches Synthesization Using Generative Adversarial Networks

The synthesis of facial sketches is an important technique in digital entertainment and law enforcement agencies. Recent advancements in deep learning have shown its possibility in generating images/sketches using attribute guided features. Facial features are important attributes because they determine human faces' detailed description and appearance during sketch generation. Traditionally, the forensic or composite artist has to sketch by interviewing witnesses manually. To automate this process of face sketch generation, a deep learning-based generative adversarial network incorporated with multiple activation functions is proposed for its efficiency improvement. The proposed model is extensively tested using different evaluation metrics such as RMSE, PSNR, SSIM, SRE, SAM, UIQ & BRISQUE.
Exploring the role of the body in communicating ironic stance

Performing and understanding conversational irony requires a complex management of multiple viewpoints. To communicate and negotiate these intricate viewpoint shifts, speakers (and addressees) often use nonverbal means (e.g. gaze shifts, shrugs, shifts in body orientation, hand gestures, etc.) next to verbal viewpoint strategies. In the present paper we zoom in on the perspective of the speaker and try to describe and quantify bodily behavior in ironic utterances compared to non-ironic ones. To this end, we use data from a video-corpus of three-party interactions with participants wearing mobile eye-tracking devices that allow for precise eye gaze data. Our results show that speakers display more of the multimodal resources under scrutiny in ironic cases compared to non-ironic cases. More specifically, the involvement of bodily resources is mainly manifested in the use of laughter, head movements and body repositionings. We further show how those resources cluster into certain multimodal packages, and how the exact timing of the bodily behavior is relevant (i.e. the gaze behavior at the end of an ironic segment differs most notably from the end of a non-ironic one). Next to a quantitative analysis of the resources used in ironic talk in interaction, we also illustrate our findings with qualitative descriptions of relevant examples.
Decellularized In Vitro Capillaries for Studies of Metastatic Tendency and Selection of Treatment

Vascularization plays an important role in the microenvironment of the tumor. Therefore, it should be a key element to be considered in the development of in vitro cancer assays. In this study, we decellularized in vitro capillaries to remove genetic material and optimized the medium used to increase the robustness and versatility of applications. The growth pattern and drug responses of cancer cell lines and patient-derived primary cells were studied on decellularized capillaries. Interestingly, two distinct growth patterns were seen when cancer cells were grown on decellularized capillaries: “network” and “cluster”. Network formation correlated with the metastatic properties of the cells and cluster formation was observed in non-metastatic cells. Drug responses of patient-derived cells correlated better with clinical findings when cells were cultured on decellularized capillaries compared with those cultured on plastic. Decellularized capillaries provide a novel method for cancer cell culture applications. It bridges the gap between complex 3D culture methods and traditional 2D culture methods by providing the ease and robustness of 2D culture as well as an in vivo-like microenvironment and scaffolding for 3D cultures.
HF-Based Sensorless Control of a FTPMM in Ship Shaftless Rim-Driven Thruster System

Take a dual-winding permanent magnet fault tolerant motor (FTPMM) in the ship shaftless rim-driven thruster (RDT) as the research object, the position sensorless control algorithm based on high frequency (HF) current injection is presented to estimate the rotor position and the rotor position signal is extracted from the voltage. In order to reduce influences of proportional-integral (PI) controller, current regulators and voltage calculation errors, the generalized second-order integrator (SOGI) is discussed along with how to combine with the low-speed sensorless control. And the current vector fault-tolerant control strategy is applied to compensate for the faulty phase current with other healthy phase currents. The rotor position at low speed is estimated under healthy as well as open-circuit faulty conditions by using the HF current injection algorithm based on SOGI (HF-SOGI). After simulation in Matlab/Simulink, the experimental results further demonstrate the feasibility of the HF-SOGI strategy by the FTPMM experimental setup. It can be calculated that the rotor speed ripple is decreased obviously after fault-tolerant control strategy is applied. It can be concluded that the HF-SOGI strategy can estimate the position accurately, which can further improve the reliability and application scope of FTPMM and the RDT system.
Equivalent incorporation of Chinese milk vetch and rice straw enhanced nutrient mineralization and reduced greenhouse gas emissions

ABSTRACT Incorporation of crop residues into the soil provides essential nutrients and increases carbon stocks, which also increases greenhouse gas emissions from the soil. The present study was conducted to determine the effect of co-incorporation of Chinese milk vetch (CMV) and rice straw (RS) at different mixing rations on the dynamics of nutrient mineralization and the emissions of CO2 and CH4. The Fluvo-aquic paddy soil was collected and mixed with crop residues at 20 g kg−1 soil and incubated for 187 days. The CMV and RS were incorporated with the ratios of 100%:0% (M100), 75%:25% (M75S25), 50%:50% (M50S50), 25%:75% (M25S75), and 0%:100% (S100), respectively. Results showed soil total nitrogen (N) concentrations were higher with the higher proportion of CMV in the mixing residues. At 8 days of incubation (DOI), both soil available phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) concentrations were greater in treatments with the higher ratio of RS, but there were no significant differences among M75S25, M50S50, M25S75, and S100 at and after 37 DOI. The CO2 emission rate of M100 was significantly higher than that of other treatments at 8 and 12 DOI. Even though the CH4 emission rate of M50S50 was significantly higher than that of other treatments at 8 DOI, S100 resulted in the significantly higher cumulative production of CH4 after 22 DOI. Predicted from the exponential regression models, S100 had the highest CO2-C and CH4-C mineralization potentials. Additionally, the M50S50 treatment resulted in 3.7%-54.7% higher microbial biomass carbon (MBC) concentration than other treatments at the end of the incubation. In summary, the mixing ratio of 1:1 was recommended for the co-incorporation of CMV and RS by considering both the nutrients availability and the greenhouse gas emissions.
The Incidence Risk for Primary Glaucoma and Its Subtypes following Chronic Exposure to Ionizing Radiation in the Russian Cohort of Mayak Nuclear Workers

Simple Summary Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide and also represents one of the normal tissue complications following radiation therapy involving ocular radiation exposure. It has widely been considered that such secondary glaucoma occurs at fractionated high dose (several tens of Gy). In contrast, this study is the first to report that normal-tension glaucoma (a subtype of primary open-angle glaucoma) occurs in radiation workers at a chronic dose of >1 Gy. Such elevated risk of radiogenic normal-tension glaucoma, if confirmed in other cohorts, has significant implications for normal tissue complications in radiotherapy patients receiving ocular radiation exposure, and for ocular radiation protection in radiation workers. Abstract Secondary glaucoma is a typical normal tissue complication following radiation therapy involving ocular radiation exposure at high fractionated dose (several tens of Gy). In contrast, recent studies in acutely exposed Japanese atomic bomb survivors showed a significantly increased risk for normal-tension glaucoma (NTG, a subtype of primary open-angle glaucoma) at much lower dose, but such information is not available in any other cohorts. We therefore set out to evaluate the incidence of risk for primary glaucoma and its subtypes in a Russian cohort of Mayak Production Association nuclear workers who received chronic radiation exposure over many years. Of these, we found a significantly increased relative risk (RR) of NTG incidence (RR = 1.88 95% confidence intervals (CI): 1.01, 3.51; p = 0.047) in workers exposed to gamma rays at cumulative brain absorbed dose above >1 Gy. We observed the linear relationship between NTG incidence and brain absorbed gamma dose with an excess relative risk per unit brain absorbed dose of 0.53 (95% CI: 0.01, 1.68; p < 0.05), but not for any other subtypes nor for total primary glaucoma. Such elevated risk of radiogenic NTG incidence, if confirmed in other cohorts, has significant implications for normal tissue complications in radiotherapy patients receiving ocular radiation exposure, and for ocular radiation protection in radiation workers.
On the Scavenging Ability of Scutellarein against the OOH Radical in Water and Lipid-like Environments: A Theoretical Study

The antioxidant capability of scutellarein, a flavonoid extracted from different plants of the Scutellaria family, was computationally predicted by considering its reaction with the OOH radical in both lipid-like and water environments. The pKa and equilibrium behavior in the aqueous phase were also calculated. Different reaction mechanisms involving the most populated species were considered. The work was performed by using the density functional level of theory. The individual, total, and fraction-corrected total rate constants were obtained. The results show that scutellarein has scavenging power against the hydroperoxyl radical similar to that of Trolox, which is generally used as a reference antioxidant.
Robotic Process Automation as a Digital Transformation Tool for Increasing Organizational Resilience in Polish Enterprises

The current digital transformation (additionally accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic) is causing profound changes across a number of industries. Part of this revolution is the spread of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which enables the automation of business processes by replacing human work with advanced software robots. One of the goals of the conducted research was to develop a classification of approaches to RPA positioning in enterprises. The author also identified differences in RPA positioning between individual industries. Based on conducted literature research, the author has proposed a proprietary classification for approaches to RPA positioning: conservative, efficiency improving, and strategic. This was subject to verification based on the results of empirical research using multidimensional correspondence analysis. The survey was conducted by the author in 2020 using the CAWI method: Credible (reliable) results were obtained from 238 Polish enterprises. The multidimensional correspondence analysis, conducted on the basis of the results of the empirical research confirmed that the approaches to RPA positioning in enterprises proposed by the author did occur in business practice. The outcome of the RPA classification became the basis for qualitative research (in the form of semi-structured interviews with expert practitioners) aimed at answering the question as to whether enterprises that strategically position RPA and treat it as a tool for digital transformation increase their organizational resilience. Up until now, however, no study has been found that focuses on how RPA increases organizational resilience or what its consequences are both at the research and application levels. This article fills the research gap in this area.