Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Soils Developed from Dolomitic Shale in the Yichang Area, China and Adsorption Characteristics for Phenol

Recently, the problem of phenolic organics pollution has become increasingly serious. More and more strategies have been developed to remove phenolic organics from water, including oxidation, adsorption, chemical precipitation, etc. Among them, adsorption technology has attracted great attention due to its advantages of high efficiency, simplicity and easy operation. In this study, the natural shale soil without any modification was directly used as adsorbent to remove phenol from aqueous solutions. The shale soil samples were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and nitrogen adsorption-desorption isotherms. Detailed kinetics and isotherm studies of phenol adsorption onto shale were investigated. According to the results of the orthogonal test, the influence degree of the four factors on the removal of phenol by soil samples was operating temperature > adsorbent dosage > contact time > pH. The adsorption kinetics of phenols by the soil corresponded with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model. Thermodynamic studies indicated that Freundlich adsorption isotherm model could better describe phenol removal characteristics than Langmuir adsorption isotherm model. And the maximum adsorption capacity was found to be 9.68 mg/g for phenol. It is concluded that shale soil without any modification or activated methods could be employed as a low-cost alternative adsorbent for wastewater treatment.
Unsupervised Network Quantization via Fixed-Point Factorization

The deep neural network (DNN) has achieved remarkable performance in a wide range of applications at the cost of huge memory and computational complexity. Fixed-point network quantization emerges as a popular acceleration and compression method but still suffers from huge performance degradation when extremely low-bit quantization is utilized. Moreover, current fixed-point quantization methods rely heavily on supervised retraining using large amounts of the labeled training data, while the labeled data are hard to obtain in the real-world applications. In this article, we propose an efficient framework, namely, fixed-point factorized network (FFN), to turn all weights into ternary values, i.e., {−1, 0, 1}. We highlight that the proposed FFN framework can achieve negligible degradation even without any supervised retraining on the labeled data. Note that the activations can be easily quantized into an 8-bit format; thus, the resulting networks only have low-bit fixed-point additions that are significantly more efficient than 32-bit floating-point multiply–accumulate operations (MACs). Extensive experiments on large-scale ImageNet classification and object detection on MS COCO show that the proposed FFN can achieve about more than $20\times $ compression and remove most of the multiply operations with comparable accuracy. Codes are available on GitHub at https://github.com/wps712/FFN.
Improving the understanding of written peer feedback through face-to-face peer dialogue: students’ perspective

ABSTRACT Feedback plays a vital role in the process of mastering writing in many academic disciplines. Although peer feedback has been proven helpful to develop students’ academic writing competency, the role of additional face-to-face peer dialogue in this context remains indistinct. Face-to-face peer dialogue on written peer feedback is expected to improve students’ understanding; however, it is unclear under which conditions it might do so. The purpose of this exploratory study is to explore students’ beliefs about peer feedback and to investigate both the instructiveness of face-to-face peer dialogue and the conditions for achieving improved understanding. Second-year university students (N = 84) participated in a mixed-method study that included questionnaires and focus groups. The intervention comprised face-to-face dialogue in small groups about the participants’ written peer feedback on a draft report. Quantitative data showed students perceived peer feedback as meaningful, useful and a very important skill to possess. They felt confident about feedback quality, both provided and received. Overall, students perceived written feedback and face-to-face dialogue to be instructive, although no significant difference between the two forms was established. Qualitative findings revealed that face-to-face dialogue stimulates peers to elaborate on their written feedback, helps them deliver constructive comments and feel responsible for the feedback process. Important conditions appeared to be the quality of the written feedback, the non-anonymous character of the dialogue, and the opportunity to revise the report. It can be concluded that face-to-face peer dialogue is a useful variation within peer feedback, which enhances further elaboration and students’ engagement with feedback. This study provides insight in important conditions to design and implement face-to-face dialogue peer interventions in higher education in the context of academic writing.
Evaluation of Enzymes in the Sulfur Metabolic Pathway of Mammals and Bacteria

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii TABLE OF CONTENTS . iv CHAPTER ONE: Literature Review Part I . 1 1.1 Sulfur metabolism in mammals . 2 1.2 Conversion of methionine to homocysteine . 2 Homocysteine: The first branch point . 6 1.3. 1 Regulation of homocysteine . 8 1.3. 2 Conversion of homocysteine to cysteine sulfinic acid . 10 1.4 Cysteine sulfinic acid: the second branch point . 11 1.4. 1 Regulation of cysteine sulfinic acid . 13 1.5 Structural properties of cysteine dioxygenase . 13 1.5. 1 Crosslink formation in cysteine dioxygenase . 16 1.5. 2 Identification of the crosslink in cysteine dioxygenase . 17 1.5. 3 Mechanism of crosslink formation in cysteine dioxygenase . 18 1.5. 4 Mechanism of product formation in cysteine dioxygenase . 19 1.5. 5 Conserved amino acids in cysteine dioxygenase . 22 1.6 Summary . 25
Availability of ISTE Digital Citizenship Standards Among Middle and High School Students and Its Relation to Internet Self-Efficacy

The purpose of this study was to gauge the level of availability of ISTE Digital Citizenship standards among middle and high school students in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The research employed a quantitative survey approach to measuring the availability of elements of digital citizenship. The survey was administered to a sample of 394 students from several middle and high schools. The survey items were built based on the four domains of digital citizenship by ISTE (Digital identity, Ethical behavior, Intellectual property, and Digital privacy and security). Findings revealed that students showing a high level of availability of digital citizenship in the first and second domains, as well as showing a high level of Internet self-efficacy. Based on the findings, it was recommended to put more emphasis on promoting digital citizenship among middle and high school students, especially raising awareness about intellectual property rights, cybersecurity, online bullying, digital identity, and good interaction with others over the Internet.
Land system diversity, scaling laws and polygons map analysis

Numerous lines of evidence have been presented in the literature that show the patterns of pedodiversity and biodiversity are very similar. One of the most corroborated patterns lies in the fits of the relationships between biodiversity and soil diversity to power laws according to the increase in study area. Several authors have analysed the presence of fractal and multifractal features in pedodiversity and biodiversity analyses. Similarly, it has also been found that valuable information can be extracted from the polygons of soil and vegetation maps, which also have surprising similarities. These approaches concern information on the spatial distribution of natural resources. However, other more artificial but interesting maps and their comparison have been neglected by such studies. Land systems maps and their georeferenced databases fall into this latter category, and they include most of the soil‐forming factors. In this paper a georeferenced land system database and map were analysed and the results compared with those obtained in previous pedodiversity and biodiversity studies, primarily the spatial patterns of the polygons. The results showed that the analysed land system map units followed the same patterns that were previously found in pedodiversity and biodiversity studies; that is, the power law concerning richness–area relationships. The same patterns occur with the number of polygons. Some geographers claim there is a “law” that states that there are far more small things/objects than larger ones across several orders of magnitude in geographic space and thus this regularity conforms to scaling laws, independent of the resource involved. The results obtained corroborate this conjecture irrespective of whether natural resources or artificial cartographies were analysed. This paper represents a first test of land use maps; additional work in this area is needed.
Academic English education through research-informed teaching: Capturing perceptions of Bangladeshi university students and faculty members

This article arose in response to the recent impetus for embedding inquiry-based approaches in higher education. It draws upon the perceptions of students and faculty members regarding inquiry-based education in Academic English (AE) programmes at universities in Bangladesh within an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Research-informed teaching (RIT), an intellectually stimulating and inquiry-based learning approach, is the conceptual base of the study. Data were collected from four Bangladeshi universities using a learning experience survey with students (n = 319) and semi-structured interviews with six EFL faculty members. The findings provide four guiding principles on the design and implementation of RIT-based AE programmes: (1) addressing wider educational objectives in AE education, (2) incorporating applied features in the learning activities, (3) building faculty members’ research literacy and practice, and (4) establishing academic collaboration across disciplines. While the findings are derived from Bangladesh higher education, the guiding principles and strategies have resonance internationally.
Consolidation promotes rule discovery rather than semantic abstraction

Human memory for recent events is believed to undergo reactivation during sleep. This process is thought to be relevant for the consolidation of both individual episodic memories and gist extraction, the formation of generalized memory representations from multiple, related memories. Which kinds of gist are actually enhanced, however, is the subject of less consensus. To address this question, we focused our design on four types of gist: inferential gist (relations extracted across non-contiguous events), statistical learning (regularities extracted from a series), summary gist (a theme abstracted from a temporally contiguous series of items), and category gist (characterization of a stimulus at a higher level in the semantic hierarchy). Sixty-nine participants (30 men, 38 women, and 1 other) completed memory encoding tasks addressing these types of gist and corresponding retrieval tasks the same evening, the morning after, and one week later. Inferential gist and statistical learning were retained over a week, whereas memory for associative gist (category and summary gist) decayed. Higher proportions of REM and more spindles were associated with worse performance in a statistical learning task controlling for time and after one week, respectively. Our results suggest consolidation processes promote discovery of rules through synthesis of episodes (statistical learning and transitive inference), rather than semantic abstraction per se (category and summary gist). They further support the view that REM sleep is involved in schema disintegration, which works against participants’ ability to identify regularities within temporal series. C > E), one second order inference pair (B > E), one non-inference pair (A>F). Test trials response the Inference pairs are higher-order that between as for formation of superordinate
The banana (Musa acuminata) MYB gene family and MaMYB14, MaMYB63 and MaMYB110 expression in response to salinity-stress in cv. Berangan

Abstract MYB transcription factors are among important regulators of abiotic stress responses, including response to the major agricultural constraint of increased salinity. To determine MYB gene family members associated with stress in the major starch crop banana (Musa acuminata Colla) a genome-wide analysis was made. A non-redundant set of 154 MYB genes (MaMYB) is predicted to encode proteins with variable lengths mostly localised in the nucleus. Based on the conserved repeats, MaMYB fall into subfamilies R1-MYB, R2R3-MYB and R1R2R3-MYB, with the majority (80.5%) in the R2R3-MYB subfamily. Ontology prediction indicates the involvement of MaMYB in the regulation of plant development, metabolism, cellular and various stress responses. MaMYB genes show ubiquitous distribution among the 11 banana chromosomes with the highest density in chromosome 9 (11.04%). The chromosomal distribution pattern strongly indicates that dispersed duplication mainly contributed to the expansion within the MaMYB gene family in the banana. Phylogenetic analysis identified three R2R3-MaMYB gene candidates with high similarity to salt responsive orthologues from other species. Quantitative RT-PCR analysis showed MaMYB14, MaMYB63 and MaMYB110 to have significantly increased expression in the roots of banana plants exposed to salt stress.
Removal of heavy metals from wastewater by natural growing plants on River Nile banks in Egypt

Green remediation is a known technology that uses different types of plants to extract contaminants from the environment. This study aims to remove heavy metals from treated wastewater by using natural growing plants on River Nile banks in Egypt. Secondary treated efﬂuent was collected from West Gerga wastewater treatment plant, located in Sohag city, Egypt. Experiments using two types of aquatic plants were carried out. They were planted individually and in combination with different densities on the secondary treated wastewater surface for 10 days' retention time to remove cadmium (Cd), nickel (Ni) and lead (Pb). It was concluded that both plants have high capabilities to remove heavy metals directly from treated wastewater. The removal efficiency of Cd and Pb was higher when they were planted together than when individually planted. A positive relationship was observed between detention time and heavy metals removal. The removal efficiency of heavy metals increased with the increase of plant density for both plant types. Also, the availability of aquatic plants and their free cost makes their use an economically attractive alternative. In addition, the removal of these plants from River Nile improves the performance of water distribution networks in Egypt.
The surface softness and mechanical properties of wood pulp–lyocell wet-laid nonwoven fabric

Abstract This study explores the tensile properties of wet-laid nonwoven fabric made from softwood bleached kraft pulp (SwBKP), hardwood bleached kraft pulp (HwBKP), dissolving pulp (DP), and Lyocell. Five different ratios of wood pulp and Lyocell (0/100, 10/90, 20/80, 30/70, 40/60, and 50/50) were manufactured using papermaking technology, which is similar to wet-laid technology. The results indicate that the properties of strength and surface softness of a nonwoven fabric are enhanced by the contribution of the entanglements of wood pulp–Lyocell. Of the three pulps, SwBKP is superior to both HwBKP and DP on account of its higher properties of density and tensile strength, which are increased by refining treatments. In terms of the surface softness component results, HwBKP has a lower MMD value than the other samples. The SwBKP–Lyocell mixing ratios with the minimum ratio of 30/70 were found to offer sufficient tensile strength with improved softness.
Transferability of Microsatellite Markers across Eleven Species of Magnolia L.

The genus Magnolia (Magnoliaceae) comprises more than 130 species distributed predominantly in temperate and tropical regions in Southeast Asia and is valued worldwide for its ornamental traits as well as for timber and medicinal products, and in trade. Despite their favored status, many species of Magnolia are faced with threats from logging, agricultural land use, development, and collection, and are at risk of extinction. Conservation of these species through habitat preservation and in ex situ collections is needed to prevent extinction. To provide a tool for conservation of Magnolia species, microsatellite markers developed previously for Magnolia ashei were tested in 10 other species of Magnolia to determine their transferability across species. Of the 64 primer pairs tested, 21 amplified alleles in the expected size range in all samples; 11 primer pairs amplified clean products in most, but not all, species; 18 primer pairs consistently amplified a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) product in most species, but had either low peak height or other amplification issues; and 14 primers showed excessive stutter, nonspecific amplification, or no amplification. Cluster analysis using the 129 alleles amplified by these 21 simple sequence repeat (SSR) primer pairs generated groups that corresponded to the known taxonomic relationships in this genus.
Phylogenetics of Annona cherimola (Annonaceae) and some of its closest relatives

Annona cherimola is a woody perennial species in the Annonaceae family that produces edible fruits and has economic importance in several regions of the world with subtropical climates. Together with other 10‐12 species, A. cherimola belongs to the section Atta of the Annona genus with a center of origin in Central America and the Caribbean. Species of the section Atta produce soft skin ripe fruits with raised areoles bounded by recessed furrows. Annona cherimola is the only species of the section naturally found in the Andean region of South America. Currently, no information is available at the molecular level on the phylogenetic relationships of most of the species of Atta and closely related sections in Annona. In order to fill this gap, in this work a phylogenetic approach was performed using five coding and non‐coding plastid DNA regions, to determine the phylogenetic relationships between A. cherimola and other related species included in Atta and other sections of the genus. The results obtained support recent studies that demonstrated the likely Mesoamerican origin of A. cherimola based on biogeographical analysis with SSR markers, rather than the previously considered South American origin hypothesis. In addition, the species belonging to the Atta section did not show monophyly. Finally, A. cherimola and A. pruinosa seem to be phylogenetically close species and additional studies are needed to discern the relations between them.
Non-native honey bees disproportionately dominate the most abundant floral resources in a biodiversity hotspot

Most plant–pollinator mutualisms are generalized. As such, they are susceptible to perturbation by abundant, generalist, non-native pollinators such as the western honey bee (Apis mellifera), which can reach high abundances and visit flowers of many plant species in their expansive introduced range. Despite the prevalence of non-native honey bees, their effects on pollination mutualisms in natural ecosystems remain incompletely understood. Here, we contrast community-level patterns of floral visitation by honey bees with that of the diverse native pollinator fauna of southern California, USA. We show that the number of honey bees visiting plant species increases much more rapidly with flower abundance than does that of non-honey bee insects, such that the percentage of all visitors represented by honey bees increases with flower abundance. Thus, honey bees could disproportionately impact the most abundantly blooming plant species and the large numbers of both specialized and generalized pollinator species that they sustain. Honey bees may preferentially exploit high-abundance floral resources because of their ability to recruit nest-mates; these foraging patterns may cause native insect species to forage on lower-abundance resources to avoid competition. Our results illustrate the importance of understanding foraging patterns of introduced pollinators in order to reveal their ecological impacts.
The Effects of Personality Types and Demographic Factors on Overconfidence Bias and Decision Making of Investment Types

In financial management theories an investor will act rationally and make a desicion to invest based on the rules in the financial management theory. Nevertheless, in reality the decision making to invest is very often irrational and not in accordance with the financial management theory. This deviation is caused by the bias of investors’ behaviour in making a decision. Investors who only focus on the return of an investment without paying attention to the risks are said to experience overconfidence bias. This research analyses the factors which are considered to influence investors with overconfidence bias in deciding the investment types. The factors are personality type, marital status, income level, work experience, and fields of study that have been taken. This research can contribute to completing the study of financial management, particularly in the investment decision and putting psychological factors in the analysis of financial management
A detailed characterization of sandalwood-filled high-density polyethylene composites

In this study, the performance of sandalwood (SW), as an efficient potential filler material for high-density polyethylene (HDPE), was investigated in detail. Firstly, the characterization of SW was conducted by the determination of chemical composition with chemical and thermal analysis methods. The distribution of SW particles, which were used in composite fabrication, was obtained by using a dynamic light scattering analyzer. Then, the composites of SW, whose weight fractions varied from 5% to 20%, with HDPE were produced in a high-speed thermokinetic mixer. The detailed characterization of composites was made by using thermogravimetric analysis, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), Fourier transform infrared, thermal conductivity measurements, and tensile and three-point bending tests. From DMA, storage modulus and loss modulus values of the HDPE matrix increased with increasing the weight fraction of SW. It is clearly seen that SW incorporation into HDPE at weight fractions of 5% and 20% exhibited the best improvement in terms of tensile and flexural strengths, respectively. It can be noted that the reinforcement effect of SW for HDPE is more prominent at high temperatures.