Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Early and Late of Innovative Design in the Imagination and Creativity

Imagination and creativity are important factors of design performance, but few research exam imagination and creativity on design performance simultaneously. This study attempts to examine imagination and creativity toward design performance in the front and in the final stage of concepts generation. The subjects of the study were 544 students in pairs who were participants of the two design contests. Results showed that imagination and creativity all have positive effects on design performance. Imagination affects the front and creativity affects the final stage of design performance. This study shows that imagination and creativity should be important on design education.
ADAPTIVE FUZZY PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION BASED CONGESTION MANAGEMENT USING OPTIMAL RESCHEDULING OF ACTIVE AND REACTIVE POWER

: In a deregulated electricity market one of the most important tasks of System Operator is to manage congestion. Therefore, investigation of techniques for congestion free-wheeling power is of paramount interest. One of the most practical and obvious technique of congestion management is rescheduling the power outputs of generators in the system. In the present paper, the optimal rescheduling of reactive power generation of both generator and capacitor along with the rescheduling of active power is considered to relieve congestion. The optimal rescheduling of powers in a pool model is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. This paper proposes Adaptive Fuzzy Particle Swarm Optimization based Optimal Power Flow for solving the non linear optimization problem to minimize the Congestion Cost. For the better performance of Particle Swarm Optimization, in the proposed method, the inertia weight is dynamically adjusted using fuzzy IF/THEN rules to increase the balance between global and local searching abilities. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been tested on a 75-bus Indian Practical System and 39-bus New England system. The simulation experiments reveal that AFPSO performs better than other Evolutionary Algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization, Real and Binary Coded Genetic Algorithm and Conventional Optimization methods.
Stress Fiber Dependent Axial Organization of Fibronectin Fibrils in the Basal Lamina of the Chick Aorta and Mesenteric Artery

Stress fiber expression and fibronectin distribution were studied in perfusion-fixed, en face preparations of chick aorta and mesenteric artery stained with fluorescent phalloidin, anti-fibronectin or anti-vinculin. Transmission electron microscopy, ultrastructural immuno-cytochemistry and confocal laser scanning microscopy were also used. Thick stress fibers aligned parallel to the vessel axis were prevalent in the aorta and the proximal part of the mesenteric artery, but their number and caliber decreased with vessel size. Fibronectin fibrils were also aligned parallel to the direction of blood flow in the aorta and the proximal portion of the mesenteric artery, the degree of alignment gradually decreasing as the mesenteric artery diminished in size. Stress fibers and fibronectin fibrils were often colinear and appeared to be tightly coupled, forming a structure similar to the adhesion plaque of cultured cells. In a small area immediately downstream from a flow divider, endothelial cells were polygonal .
Modeling multivariate operational losses via copula-based distributions with g-and-h marginals

We propose a family of copula-based multivariate distributions with g-and- h marginals. After studying the properties of the distribution, we develop a two-step estimation strategy and analyze via simulation the sampling distribution of the estimators. The methodology is used for the analysis of a 7-dimensional dataset containing 40,871 operational losses. The empirical evidence suggests that a distribution based on a single copula is not flexible enough, thus we model the dependence structure by means of vine copulas. We show that the approach based on regular vines improves the fit. Moreover, even though losses corresponding to different event types are found to be dependent, the assumption of perfect positive dependence is not supported by our analysis. As a result, the Value-at-Risk of the total operational loss distribution obtained from the copula- based technique is substantially smaller at high confidence levels, with respect to the one obtained using the common practice of summing the univariate Value-at-Risks.
Critical Excitation Capacitance for Isolated Self – Excited Induction Generator

The performance of self-excited induction generator was thoroughly analyzed regarding the values of the critical excitation capacitance and the frequency of the generated voltage. Analytical expressions were derived for the value of the minimum excitation capacitor under different load types/operating conditions. The advised expressions were verified experimentally and by, a robust meta-heuristic optimization technique, Genetic Algorithm. Furthermore, the feasibility, suitability and effectiveness of the proposed formulas were corroborated for generators with different sizes/ratings through the correlation of the results from the derived expressions and Genetic Algorithm for such machines.
Do Customer Emotions Affect Agent Speed? An Empirical Study of Emotional Load in Online Customer Contact Centers

Problem definition: Research in operations management has focused mainly on system-level load, ignoring the fact that service agents and customers express a variety of emotions that may impact service processes and outcomes. We introduce the concept of emotional load—the emotional demands that customer behaviors impose on service agents—to analyze how customer emotions affect service worker’s behavior. Academic/practical relevance: Most theories in organizational behavior literature predict that emotions expressed by customers reduce agent’s cognitive abilities and therefore, should reduce the agent’s speed (e.g., by increasing the service time required to serve an angry customer). We aim to shed light on the magnitude of that phenomenon while addressing important econometric challenges. We also investigate an important mechanism that drives this relation, namely agent effort. We discuss practical opportunities that arise from measuring emotional load and how it can be used to enhance productivity. Methodology: We measure the emotional load of agents using sentiment analysis tools that quantify positive/negative customer emotion expressions in an online chat-type contact center and link it to agent behavior: response time (RT) and the length and number of messages required to complete a service request. Identifying a causal effect of customer emotion on agent behavior using observational data is challenging because there are confounding factors associated with the complexity of service requests, which are related to both customer emotions and agent behavior. Our identification strategy uses panel data and exploits the variation across messages within a focal request using fixed effects to control for unobserved factors associated with case complexity. Instrumental variables are also used to address issues of measurement error and other endogeneity problems; the instruments are based on exogenous shocks to agent performance indicators that have been studied in the service operations literature. Results: Analyses show that emotional load created by negative customer emotions increases agent RT, the length of the agent messages (a measure of effort), and the required number of messages needed to complete a service request. Emotional load and agent RT reciprocally affect each other, with long agent RTs and a high number of messages producing more negative customer emotion. Managerial implications: We suggest that the emotional content in customer communications should be an important factor to consider when assigning workload to agents in a service system. Our study provides a rigorous methodology to measure the emotional content from customer text messages and objectively evaluate its associated workload. We discuss how this can be used to improve staffing decisions and dynamic workload routing through real-time monitoring of emotional load.
Genetic variation in Irish pygmy shrews Sorex minutus (Soricomorpha: Soricidae): implications for colonization history

The status of the pygmy shrew (Sorex minutus L.) as a native or an introduced species in Ireland has been subject to much debate. To examine this and other aspects of the colonization history of the Irish pygmy shrew, genetic variation was determined in 247 pygmy shrews collected throughout Ireland, using mitochondrial control region sequences and five polymorphic microsatellite loci. Genetic diversity was low for both types of marker. The median-joining network for control region sequences was star-like, suggesting that the colonization of Ireland involved a small number of founders and rapid population expansion thereafter; this was supported by other statistics. Molecular dating with both mitochondrial DNA and microsatellite data is consistent with a human introduction. This would have been several thousand years ago; a recent colonization within historical times can be ruled out. This is the first detailed population genetic study of the pygmy shrew anywhere in its range. © 2009 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2009, 97, 918–927.
Geographic and seasonal variation in biological characteristics of American eel elvers in the Bay of fundy area and on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia

Seasonal (April-July) patterns in the decline of length, mass, and condition and an increase in pigmentation stage of American eel (Anguilla rostrata) elvers collected during the estuarine commercial fishery and during entrance into fresh water varied among rivers in the Bay of Fundy and on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. Elver mean length, adjusted to a mean collection date, varied among commercially fished rivers by up to 9%; mean mass varied by up to 27%. Within commercially fished rivers, mean length declined seasonally by 2-5%, mass by 0-60%, and condition by 0-44%. Elver condition declined 7-9% by the time 50% of the run (number of elvers) had entered the East River, Chester, and East River, Sheet Harbour, and by 21% at 95% of the run, while the mean pigmentation stage increased to 4.1-4.8 and 5.7-6.5, respectively, on a scale of 1-7. Such geographic variability in biological traits may result from the effect of varying annual and seasonal environmental conditions on the coastal distribution of e.
Attitudes of Language Teachers toward Multiple-Choice Item Writing Guidelines: An Exploratory Factor Analysis

Previous research has shown that the construction of multiple-choice (MC) items is a very difficult task. As such, textbook writers have proposed some guidelines to help item writers to write more effective items. However, such guidelines reflect the intuition of their writers, and most of them are not necessarily supported by empirical research, and what is preached may not be practiced. The purpose of the present study was, therefore, to analyze the attitudes of language teachers in an EFL setting to better understand if they follow the guidelines when developing MC items. To that end, a 28-item, 5-point Likert type, researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect data from 661 Iranian language teachers. The data were analyzed using SPSS (version, 25). Results from frequency tallies and percent values showed the significance of the majority of the guidelines in the construction of MC items. However, mixed results were reported for one of the guidelines, and another guideline was considered unimportant. Findings from factor analysis yielded four major factors underlying the guidelines: Developing plausible distractors, editing and proofreading guidelines, formatting and refining items, and avoiding clues to the correct response. Drawing on the findings, we discuss the pedagogical implications for how to best develop and fine-tune MC guidelines.
Investigation of influence of forced ventilation through 3D textile on heat exchange properties of the textile layer

The intention of this study was to create a computational model in micro-scale that allows to imitate heat and mass transfer through three-dimensional textile layer with and without forced ventilation. The four ventilation rates were used 0, 0.2, 0.4 and 0.8 dm3min-1. Approximation of a unit cell geometry and heat transfer process were considered. The time-dependent and steady-state simulations are based on Navier-Stokes/Brinkman partial differential equations, and energy equation. A finite element modelling package Comsol Multiphysics was used for numerical simulations. The Laminar flow (.spf) and Heat transfer in fluids (.ht) modes were coupled with non-isothermal flow (.nitf) multi-physics. The post-processing analysis was done using Matlab software. The outcomes of simulation are temperature distributions, surface average temperature and relative humidity through the thickness of the representative volume. The results enable to create a macro-scale models for efficient simulation of heat exchange in textile packages.
The Effect of Obesity on Serum Leptin and Lipid Profile

THE IRAQI POSTGRADUATE MEDICAL JOURNAL VOL.1, NO. 1, 2009 ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Obesity has become a leading health concern; this condition is a chronic, complex, multifactorial disease in which a person's weight is ≥ 20% of the ideal weight for a given height. OBJECTIVE: To measure serum leptin level and lipid profiles levels in Iraqi obese individuals comparing the results with matching non obese subjects. METHODS: The study was carried on 30 individuals divided into two groups: 1. Obese subjects group (n=20). 2. Non-obese subjects group (n=10). For all subjects studied measurements of fasting serum leptin and lipid profile have been done. RESULT: Our study showed that mean serum leptin level was significantly higher in obese than non-obese individuals (P<0.001). In addition serum leptin correlates positively and strongly with body mass index (BMI) ( r=0.765,P<0.01). Serum leptin also correlates positively with both triglyceride (TC)(r =0.394, P<0.05) and low density lipoprotein (LDL) (r=0.366,P<0.05) but correlates negatively with high density lipoprotein (HDL)(r=-0.408,P<0.05). CONCLUSION: circulating leptin levels appear to be one of the best biological markers of obesity and hyperleptinemia is closely associated with several risk factors related to obesity syndrome.
Multi-band spectral subtraction algorithm dedicated for noise reduction in cochlear implants

In this work, a new multi-band spectral subtraction based noise reduction algorithm is proposed for cochlear implants (CI). The enhanced speech signal is estimated on each stimulation channel. For performance evaluation, some objective speech assessment tests relying on Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score and speech Itakura-Saito (IS) distortion measurement were performed to choose the best noise estimation algorithm. In order to evaluate the speech intelligibility, subjective listening tests were assessed with 50 normal hearing listeners using a specific CI simulator and three cochlear implantees. Experimental results, obtained using French Lafon database corrupted by an additive babble noise and speech-shaped noise at different Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNR), showed that proposed multi-band spectral subtraction algorithm produces significant improvements to speech recognition compared to the subjects’ daily strategy.
COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RADICAL SCAVENGING ACTIVITY, ANTIOXIDANT CAPACITY AND PHENOLIC PROFILES OF SELECTED KIWIFRUIT GENOTYPES GROWN IN NEW ZEALAND

The aim of this study was to assess phenolic profiles, in vitro radical scavenging activity and antioxidant activity of five different kiwifruit cultivars namely, A. deliciosa cultivar Hayward, A.deliciosacv Sweetgreen, A.chinensiscv Hort16A (Gold), A.chinensis cv Sungold (Gold 3) and A. macrosperma grown in New Zealand. Phenolic compounds were extracted using 70% acetone by steeping technique, and the content of total phenol, flavonoid, flavanol were determined spectrometric ally. Antioxidant capacity and radical scavenging activity were determined by ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) assay and 2,2-diphenyl-2-picylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging assay, respectively. Among the five different kiwifruit cultivars tested, A. macrosperma resulted in the significantly higher values of total phenolic (TP) content (823±14.4 mg gallic acid equivalent/100 g dry weight [DW]), total flavonoid (TFO) content (171±1.9 mg catechin equivalent (CE)/100 g DW), total flavanol (TFA) content (82.6±0.6 mg CE/100 g DW), radical scavenging activity (5.1±0.1 mmol Trolox equivalent/100 g DW) and the antioxidant capacity (8.3±0.1 mmol Fe (II) equivalent/100 g DW). High correlation (R= 0.942) observed between FRAP and DPPH antioxidant capacities implied that antioxidants in these kiwifruit extracts were capable of scavenging free radicals (DPPH) and reducing oxidants. The presented result along with the qualitative analysis on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with diode array detector (DAD)and quantitative analysis on Liquid chromatography electrospray ionization coupled with mass spectrometry (UPLC-ESI-MS/MS) revealed that A. macrosperma is an excellent source of potential phenolic antioxidants compared to commercially available kiwifruits cultivars.
FINITE ELEMENT MODEL EVALUATION OF A PERCUTANEOUS TECHNIQUE FOR REPAIRING PROXIMAL FEMORA WITH METASTATIC LESIONS

INTRODUCTION: Metastatic lesions in the proximal femur are a common and often painful manifestation of breast cancer that can lead to pathologic fracture. A proposed minimally invasive procedure for preventing fracture involves removing the lesions and injecting bone cement (polymethylmethacrylate) into remaining defects via a drill hole through the lateral aspect of the greater trochanter (Fig. 1a). The structural feasibility of this procedure was demonstrated in a study on cadaveric femora with burred defects representing metastatic lesions. However, mechanical testing using matched pairs of femora only allowed for comparison of hip strength after repair (Srepair) with hip strength of the contralateral intact femur, which was used as an estimate of the strength of the ipsilateral intact femur (Sintact). Comparison of these measures with hip strength of the femur with the unrepaired defect (Sdefect) was not possible. In contrast, use of finite element (FE) modeling would enable a well-controlled study in which all three strength values could be compared for each femur. CT scan-based FE models can predict the strength of proximal femora both with and without metastatic lesions, although the validity of these models for predicting the strength of femora injected with bone cement is unknown. Therefore, the goals of this study were (a) to validate FE-model predictions of hip strength for femora containing bone cement; (b) to use the validated FE models to evaluate the structural deficit caused by defects at several locations within the femoral neck; and (c) to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed surgical technique for repairing those defects.
CONGENITAL LOWER LIMB DEFICIENCIES IN FINLAND

In the 1950’s congenital limb deficiencies became well-recognized birth defect because of the use of thalidomide treating morning sickness in pregnant women. Despite of many studies the causation of many congenital limb deficiencies is mainly unknown. Upper and lower limb develop simultaneously during the organogenetic phase in early pregnancy (fourth to eight weeks of gestation). This is rapidly differentiating phase and therefore it is the phase most sensitive to teratogens causing major birth defects. Congenital lower limb reductions are rare but they are usually visible at birth and thus are well documented by registries. There are just a few population-based studies about the epidemiology of lower limb deficiencies. There are no population-based studies about the burden of hospital care of lower limb deficiencies to the healthcare system. The aim of this study was to describe risk factors for congenital limb reduction defects and also explore maternal medication use just before pregnancy and during the first trimester. The purpose was to find out features of congenital lower limb reduction defects and to determine the prevalence of congenital lower limb deficiencies and associated mortality and to identify patterns of associated anomalies. The aim was also to explore the impact, that children with lower limb reduction pose to health-care system. The data is based on registries maintained by the Finnish institute for health and welfare. We found that maternal pregestational diabetes, nulliparity and young and old maternal age increased the risk of congenital limb deficiencies. The use of progesterone and antiepileptics before pregnancy and during the first trimester had impact on the risk of congenital limb reductions. The total prevalence of congenital lower limb deficiencies was 2.8 per 10 000 births and the perinatal mortality was 78 per 1000 births. Almost half the cases with lower limb reductions had associated major anomalies The need of hospital care and the number of orthopedic procedures was markedly increased in the patients with congenital lower limb deficiency compared to whole pediatric population.
Novel genes required for proper cell envelope function in the plant symbiont Rhizobium leguminosarum

The cell envelope of Gram-negative bacteria is a complex structure that is critical for facilitating interactions between bacteria and their environment. The objective of this research was to identify and characterize novel genes required for proper cell envelope development in the legume symbiont Rhizobium leguminosarum. In R. leguminosarum there is a positive correlation between mutations that affect cell envelope structure and sensitivity to peptide-rich media; therefore, I implemented an innovative transposon mutagenesis approach to identify novel genes connected to the cell envelope by screening for mutants unable to grow on peptide-rich media, but unaffected in growth on minimal media. Of the 10 mutants isolated, 5 of the mutations were mapped to cell envelope components; therefore, the genetic screen was successful. Three mutants were chosen for further study because the mutations were in uncharacterized genes that affected the cell envelope function. One of the mutations was mapped to the putative ATP binding component of an ABC transporter. This mutant had significantly decreased levels of exopolysaccharide (EPS) compared to wild-type, and was also desiccation sensitive and unable to form biofilms. Another mutation mapped to the gene fabF2XL, which is required for synthesis of the unique lipid A very long chain fatty acid (VLCFA). The third mutation mapped to a conserved hypothetical membrane protein, RL3501, that is part of a four gene operon. Both of these genes were critical for maintaining membrane stability in the presence of detergents, hydrophobic antibiotics, and antimicrobial peptides. Mutation of fabF2XL or RL3501 also had a negative impact on plant infection, and expression of an outer