Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biocontrol of Fruit Discoloring and Fruit Rot Disease in Longan (Dimocarpus longan) by Using Antagonistic Bacillus spp.

Fruit discoloration and fruit rot disease in longan is a serious disease caused by the pathogenic fungi Pestalotiopsis oxyanthi and Lasiodiplodia pseudotheobromae. This study investigated the potential of antagonistic bacteria as an eco-friendly alternative to traditional fungicides for managing longan diseases caused by these fungal pathogens. Two bacterial isolates, UP-JLS050 and UP-JLS067, demonstrated significant inhibitory activity against the pathogenic fungi P. oxyanthi and L. pseudotheobromae, with high inhibitory activity. The bacterial strains were isolated from leaves and soil in a longan garden, and dual culture methods showed that the isolates UP-JLS050 and UP-JLS067 exhibited the highest inhibitory activity on the fungal pathogens, with percentage inhibitions of 72.67 ± 2.31 and 70.37 ± 1.28 %, respectively. Biochemical methods and molecular techniques, including sequencing of the 16S rDNA gene, were then used to identify the isolates. This confirmed their similarity to Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus amyloliquefaciens with 100 and 99 % identity, respectively. In vitro tests on longan fruit indicated that these antagonistic bacteria, administered at a concentration of 108 CFU/mL, significantly reduced disease incidence by up to 45 % after 9 days of incubation. The incubation of B. subtilis (UP-JLS050) and B. amyloliquefaciens (UP-JLS050) reduced disease incidence by 45 ± 5.77 and 32.5 ± 5.00 %, respectively. HIGHLIGHTS Fruit Discoloration and Rot in Longan: Caused by pathogenic fungi, namely Pestalotiopsis oxyanthi and Lasiodiplodia pseudotheobromae Antagonistic Bacteria for Disease Control: This study explores the potential of antagonistic bacteria as an eco-friendly alternative to traditional fungicides for managing longan diseases caused by these fungal pathogens Effective Inhibition: Two bacterial isolates, UP-JLS050 and UP-JLS067, demonstrated significant inhibitory activity against oxyanthi and L. pseudotheobromae, with inhibitions exceeding 70 % on PDA medium Identification of Bacterial Strains: Molecular techniques, including 16S rDNA gene sequencing, confirmed the identity of these isolates as subtilis and B. amyloliquefaciens Reduced Disease Incidence: In vitro tests on longan fruit indicated that these antagonistic bacteria, administered at a concentration of 108 CFU/ml, significantly reduced disease incidence by up to 45 % after 9 days of incubation GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Mitigating the effects of sand dunes on seismic data from the Rub al Khali basin, Saudi Arabia

The Rub Al Khali region in Saudi Arabia is characterized by the presence of sand dunes separated by salt flats, also called Sabkhas. In general, the elevation of dunes in this region varies between 90 and 250 m above sea level. The presence of these sand dunes, along with the rapidly changing surface topography poses challenges for seismic data acquisition and processing. The high contrast in acoustic impedance between the dune base and the underlying formation often results in amplification of seismic waves that are recorded at stations located on the surface of sand dunes. Attempts to address the issue using conventional surface‐consistent amplitude scaling methods without reducing these amplification effects generally fail, thus compromising the suitability of the processed data for amplitude versus offset analysis. In this study, we propose a new reference site technique to reduce the effects of sand dune amplification, enabling the production of data sets that are suitable for amplitude versus offset processing. The proposed technique uses a deterministic approach to derive surface‐consistent, frequency‐dependent de‐amplification functions for shots and stations located on the dunes only. Two‐dimensional synthetic and field data examples show that the technique significantly reduces the effects of sand dune amplification.
Moderating Role of Ownership Type in the Relationship between Market Orientation and Supply Chain Integration in E-Business in China

Integrating supply chain processes in e-business in emerging and transitional economies has attracted considerable attention from practitioners and researchers. Based on the theory of market orientation MO and the institution-based perspective, this paper investigates the effect of MO on supply chain integration SCI in e-business and examines the moderating role of ownership type in the relationship between MO and SCI in China. The results of a survey of 229 firms suggest that the MO dimensions have different effects on the supply and the demand process integration in e-business. Moreover, ownership type moderates the relationship between MO and SCI. Implications and suggestions for future research are likewise discussed.
A Six Degree-Of-Freedom Haptic Device Based On The Orthoglide And A Hybrid Agile Eye

This paper is devoted to the kinematic design of a new six degree-of-freedom haptic device using two parallel mechanisms. The first one, called orthoglide, provides the translation motions and the second one, called agile eye, produces the rotational motions. These two motions are decoupled to simplify the direct and inverse kinematics, as it is needed for real-time control. To reduce the inertial load, the motors are fixed on the base and a transmission with two universal joints is used to transmit the rotational motions from the base to the end-effector. Two alternative wrists are proposed (i), the agile eye with three degrees of freedom or (ii) a hybrid wrist made by the assembly of a two-dof agile eye with a rotary motor. The last one is optimized to increase its stiffness and to decrease the number of moving parts.
Processing Uncertainty and Indeterminacy in Information Systems success mapping

IS success is a complex concept, and its evaluation is complicated, unstructured and not readily quantifiable. Numerous scientific publications address the issue of success in the IS field as well as in other fields. But, little efforts have been done for processing indeterminacy and uncertainty in success research. This paper shows a formal method for mapping success using Neutrosophic Success Map. This is an emerging tool for processing indeterminacy and uncertainty in success research. EIS success have been analyzed using this tool.
Assessment of Mental, Emotional and Physical Stress through Analysis of Physiological Signals Using Smartphones

Determining the stress level of a subject in real time could be of special interest in certain professional activities to allow the monitoring of soldiers, pilots, emergency personnel and other professionals responsible for human lives. Assessment of current mental fitness for executing a task at hand might avoid unnecessary risks. To obtain this knowledge, two physiological measurements were recorded in this work using customized non-invasive wearable instrumentation that measures electrocardiogram (ECG) and thoracic electrical bioimpedance (TEB) signals. The relevant information from each measurement is extracted via evaluation of a reduced set of selected features. These features are primarily obtained from filtered and processed versions of the raw time measurements with calculations of certain statistical and descriptive parameters. Selection of the reduced set of features was performed using genetic algorithms, thus constraining the computational cost of the real-time implementation. Different classification approaches have been studied, but neural networks were chosen for this investigation because they represent a good tradeoff between the intelligence of the solution and computational complexity. Three different application scenarios were considered. In the first scenario, the proposed system is capable of distinguishing among different types of activity with a 21.2% probability error, for activities coded as neutral, emotional, mental and physical. In the second scenario, the proposed solution distinguishes among the three different emotional states of neutral, sadness and disgust, with a probability error of 4.8%. In the third scenario, the system is able to distinguish between low mental load and mental overload with a probability error of 32.3%. The computational cost was calculated, and the solution was implemented in commercially available Android-based smartphones. The results indicate that execution of such a monitoring solution is negligible compared to the nominal computational load of current smartphones.
On training bi-directional neural network language model with noise contrastive estimation

Although uni-directional recurrent neural network language model(RNNLM) has been very successful, it's hard to train a bi-directional RNNLM properly due to the generative nature of language model. In this work, we propose to train bi-directional RNNLM with noise contrastive estimation(NCE), since the properities of NCE training will help the model to acheieve sentence-level normalization. Experiments are conducted on two hand-crafted tasks on the PTB data set: a rescore task and a sanity test. Although(regretfully), the model trained by NCE did not out-perform the baseline uni-directional NNLM, it is shown that NCE-trained bi-directional NNLM behaves well in the sanity test and outperformed the one trained by conventional maximum likelihood training on the rescore task.
New Diagnostic Tools for Neonatal Sepsis: The Role of a Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction for the Early Detection and Identification of Bacterial and Fungal Species in Blood Samples

Summary Early diagnosis and treatment of neonatal sepsis are essential to prevent severe and life threatening complications. Consequently, rapid diagnostic tests capable to differentiate infected from non-infected newborns have the potential to make a significant impact on neonatal care. A new real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR; LightCycler® SeptiFast test MGRADE) has been proposed in the routine assessment of neonatal sepsis for the detection and identification of bacterial and fungal DNA from microorganisms which cause approximately 90% of all blood stream infections. The LightCycler® SeptiFast test can detect and identify simultaneously the 25 most important bacterial and fungal species causing bloodstream infections within few hours by using a small volume of a single whole blood sample. Real-time PCR can be easily incorporated into the hospital setting for term or near-term infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit for sepsis evaluation.
Identification of the mstE Gene Encoding a Glucose-inducible, Low Affinity Glucose Transporter in Aspergillus nidulans*

The mstE gene encoding a low affinity glucose transporter active during the germination of Aspergillus nidulans conidia on glucose medium has been identified. mstE expression also occurs in hyphae, is induced in the presence of other repressing carbon sources besides glucose, and is dependent on the function of the transcriptional repressor CreA. The expression of MstE and its subcellular distribution have been studied using a MstE-sGFP fusion protein. Concordant with data on mstE expression, MstE-sGFP is synthesized in the presence of repressing carbon sources, and fluorescence at the periphery of conidia and hyphae is consistent with MstE location in the plasma membrane. Deletion of mstE has no morphological phenotype but results in the absence of low affinity glucose uptake kinetics, the latter being substituted by a high affinity system.
A 2-transistor sub-1V low power temperature compensated CMOS voltage reference

This paper presents the design of a CMOS sub-1V voltage reference using a 2-transistor Self-Cascode MOSFET structure able to get low power consumption, temperature compensation, and small area. An efficient design procedure applied to this simple topology relying on NMOS transistors with different threshold voltages allows attaining large immunity against bias current and supply voltage variations. Besides that, the two transistors can operate in weak, moderate, or strong inversion making the design flexible in terms of area and power consumption. Implemented in a 0.18 μm standard CMOS technology, the circuit provides a 400mV voltage reference with a variation of ±0.18% from -20°C to 75°C (or less than 15ppm/°C), operates from 3.6V down to 800mV while biased with a 5nA resistor-less PTAT current source that varies ±30% over PVT, and consumes less than 20nA. The complete circuit including the current source and the 2-transistor Self-Cascode MOSFET occupies an area of 0.01mm2.
An Approach for Urban Catchment Model Updating

Places with limited coverage of rainfall gauges could present the challenge of providing accurate predictions, especially in cases of urbanised areas with rapid responses to heavy rainfall events. Physically-based models can represent the physics and spatial distribution of rainfall events in urban watersheds. Data assimilation techniques have been widely used in hydraulic and hydrological models to update model states and provide a more reliable prediction. However, model updating in case of non-linear systems is considerably complex. In this study, we present an approach to update an urban model assimilating water level values. The preliminary results of this study show a significant improvement in the results of simulations when assimilating water level observation. The methodology is applied in the city of São Carlos, in Brazil, where the urban system is modelled using SWMM.
Induction of the Paraoxonase-1 Gene Expression by Resveratrol

Objective—The human paraoxonase-1 (PON-1) is a high-density lipoprotein-associated enzyme, mainly secreted by the liver, that displays protective properties toward cardiovascular disease and organophosphate intoxication. Resveratrol is a polyphenolic phytoalexin found in grapes and wine and is thought to display cardioprotective effects. It is able to interact with transcriptional modulators such as the estrogen receptor α (ERα). We investigated the effect of resveratrol on the PON-1 gene expression. Methods and Results—PON-1 activity assays, Northern blot, and transfection experiments showed that resveratrol increased the PON-1 gene expression in human hepatocyte primary cultures and in the HuH7 hepatoma cell line involving a transcriptional mechanism. The resveratrol effect was not ERα-dependent and was surprisingly mediated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) and an unconventional AhR responsive element in the PON-1 gene promoter. This agonist effect of resveratrol was specific for this DNA motif and was not observed on classical AhR responsive elements. Conclusions—These observations suggest that the PON-1 gene induction may be involved in the cardioprotective properties of resveratrol. They also highlight a ligand-dependent differential modulation of AhR-sensitive genes.
Graphically Speaking Editor : Miguel Encarnação Methods for Game User Research Studying Player Behavior to Enhance Game Design

The past decade has seen the game industry evolve from a niche to a major sector of the entertainment industry. In 2010, the Entertainment Software Association reported that the computer game and videogame industry generated over US$4.9 billion in added value to the US gross domestic product. Additionally, games have become a central form of popular media that has impacted the lives of both youth and adults; 68 percent of American households play videogames. This broadening of games’ appeal has motivated the industry to create innovative forms of play; these new forms allow a variety of interactions and accommodate players of all ages, intellectual abilities, and motivations. So, designing a good game requires understanding players and their interaction with this new interactive digital experience. Consequently, game user research (GUR) has emerged as an important area of investment for the game industry and a rich domain for collaboration between user experience professionals, game developers, and academic researchers. GUR has grown into a community, which has a presence as an International Game Developers Association special-interest group, holding annual international summits and workshops (see games userresearch.org). The largest human-computer interaction organization, ACM SIGCHI, has expanded to add a branch on games. Game user researchers (we’ll just call them “researchers” from now on) help game designers improve the player experience to both meet the designers’ goals and, most important, make gameplay more pleasurable. To identify and understand the player experience, these researchers employ a variety of methods spanning both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. Here, we examine several of the most important methods and show how we applied two of them in a case study.
A Comparative Study of two Self Organising and Structurally Adaptive Dynamic Neural Tree Networks

This paper examines the performance of Dynamic Neural Tree Networks (DNTNs) which perform hierarchical clustering on unlabelled data. DNTNs are a form of competitive learning neural networks where the competitive neurons are created dynamically, forming a tree configuration which represents the structure inherent in the data set. Two such models have been produced independently by Racz and Klotz and Li, Tang and Suen. The models are critically evaluated both theoretically and empirically. The performance of the DNTN models are compared to one another and to standard Competitive networks. DNTNs provide a hierarchically structured clustering technique, that converges quickly and can handle large data sets. Tests run over the models implemented demonstrate the potential of such networks.
Identifying the Main Factors Contributing to the Spatial Variability of Soil Saline–Sodic Properties in a Reclaimed Coastal Area

A spatial model was used for identifying the main factors affecting spatial variability of soil salt. Land‐use pattern was the most influential factor that affected spatial variation of soil salt. The generalized least squares model was suitable for soil salt content in Transect 2. This study is helpful for agronomic management practices in coastal reclamation areas.
Ground moving targets imaging via compressed sensing based on discrete FrFT

To reduce the amount of echo data in ground moving targets imaging, an imaging method of ground moving targets is proposed with compressed data based on discrete fractional Fourier transform and Compressed Sensing. Firstly, the DPCA technique is induced to cancel the clutters with the range-compression signals. Secondly, based on the sparsity of the azimuth signals of the moving targets in fractional Fourier domain, the discrete fractional Fourier transform matrix is constructed as the sparse basis matrix. Then the imaging processing of the moving targets with random down-sampled data is converted into solving an optimization problem, and also the moving parameters of moving targets are obtained by the optimal orders. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method is proved by the simulation results.
Evaluation of wound healing process based on texture analysis

Wound healing rate, remains an interesting and important issue, in which modern imaging techniques have not yet given a definitive answer. In order to guide better therapeutic interventions, a better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms driving tissue repair are required. The wound healing rate is primarily quantified by the rate of change of the wound's surface area. The objective of this study was to establish a standardised and objective technique to asses the progress of wound healing in foot by means of texture analysis. The methods of image pre-processing, segmentation and texture analysis together with visual expert's evaluation were used to assess the wound healing process. A total of 40 digital images from ten different subjects with food wounds were taken every third day, for 12 days, by an inexpensive digital camera under variable lighting conditions. The images were intensity normalized, and wounds were automatic segmented using a snake's segmentation system. From the segmented wounds 15 different texture characteristics and 4 different geometrical features were extracted in order to identify features that quantify the rate of wound healing. We found texture characteristics that may indicate the progression of wound healing process. More specifically, some texture features increase (mean, contrast), while some other texture features decrease (entropy, sum of squares variance, sum average, sum variance) with the progression of the wound healing process. Some of these features were found to be significantly different in a specific time point and this could be used to indicate the rate of wound healing. No significant differences were found for all geometrical measures. The results of this study suggest that some texture features might be used to monitor the wound healing process, thus reducing the workload of experts, provide standardization, reduce costs, and improve the quality for patients. The simplicity of the method also suggests that it may be a valuable tool in clinical wound evaluation. Future work will incorporate additional texture and geometrical features for assessing the wound healing process in order to be used in the real clinical praxis.
Neural Selectivity and Representation of Gloss in the Monkey Inferior Temporal Cortex

When we view an object, its appearance depends in large part on specific surface reflectance properties; among these is surface gloss, which provides important information about the material composition of the object and the fine structure of its surface. To study how gloss is represented in the visual cortical areas related to object recognition, we examined the responses of neurons in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex of the macaque monkey to a set of object images exhibiting various combinations of specular reflection, diffuse reflection, and roughness, which are important physical parameters of surface gloss. We found that there are neurons in the lower bank of the superior temporal sulcus that selectively respond to specific gloss. This neuronal selectivity was largely maintained when the shape or illumination of the object was modified and perceived glossiness was unchanged. By contrast, neural responses were significantly altered when the pixels of the images were randomly rearranged, and perceived glossiness was dramatically changed. The stimulus preference of these neurons differed from cell to cell, and, as a population, they systematically represented a variety of surface glosses. We conclude that, within the visual cortex, there are mechanisms operating to integrate local image features and extract information about surface gloss and that this information is systematically represented in the IT cortex, an area playing an important role in object recognition.