Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sumatran Fleabane (Conyza sumatrensis) Resistant to Psi-Inhibiting Herbicides and Physiological Responses to Paraquat

Abstract Herbicide-resistant weed management is one of the greatest agricultural challenges in crop production. Thus, the quick identification of herbicide-resistant weeds is extremely important for management. This study aimed to evaluate resistance to PSI-inhibiting herbicides (diquat) and physiological response to paraquat application in Sumatran fleabane [Conyza sumatrensis (Retz.) E. Walker; syn. : Erigeron sumatrensis Retz. ]. The research was conducted with two C. sumatrensis biotypes, one susceptible and the other with multiple resistance to herbicides from five different modes of action (glyphosate, paraquat, diuron, saflufenacil, and 2,4-D). A dose–response assay was carried out to evaluate herbicide resistance to diquat in the paraquat-resistant C. sumatrensis biotype. The enzymatic activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and ascorbate peroxidase (APX), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) content, and chlorophyll a (Chl a) fluorescence were measured in both biotypes after paraquat (400 g ai ha–1) application. The dose–response assay confirmed resistance of C. sumatrensis to diquat with resistance factor levels of 26-fold and 6-fold for LD50 and GR50 values, respectively, compared with the susceptible biotype. Accumulation of H2O2 occurred more rapidly in the paraquat-susceptible biotype than in the resistant one. Paraquat treatment caused an increase in SOD and APX activity in the susceptible biotype, but antioxidant enzyme activities were unaffected by paraquat in the resistant one at 5 h after application (HAA). Chl a fluorescence increased across the first 4 HAA in both resistant and susceptible biotypes. However, at 24 HAA, the resistant biotype showed a decline in fluorescence close to untreated plants, while the susceptible biotype died, confirming resistance to diquat in the paraquat-resistant C. sumatrensis biotype. The paraquat-resistant biotype does not induce antioxidative enzymes, as a possible mechanism of resistance to paraquat, but shows rapid recovery of photosynthesis and continuous growth when subjected to paraquat, while the paraquat-susceptible biotype does not survive.
The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility Perceptions in Brand Equity, Brand Credibility, Brand Reputation, and Purchase Intentions

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming one of the most critical challenges that firms must address to survive in the competitive market. This study investigates the impact of customers’ CSR perceptions on their purchase intentions as mediated by brand equity, brand credibility, and brand reputation in order to identify the benefits of CSR integration for business development. The study employs a quantitative approach to collect data from customers who purchase cosmetics through an online survey. PLS-SEM software is used to analyze the data from the 380 responses. The results indicate that customers’ perceptions of the CSR of a firm affect their intention to purchase its brands in the future. Brand equity, brand credibility, and brand reputation mediate the impact of CSR perceptions on purchase intentions. Since previous studies have not employed a comprehensive approach to verifying the influence that CSR exerts through brand credibility, brand reputation, and brand equity, the results provide an essential reference for academics who conduct empirical research on the subject. This paper is also particularly beneficial for marketers and managers who wish to develop marketing strategies and brand management techniques that boost business efficiency.
Historicizing the money of account—a rejoinder

Abstract “In Defence of the Nominalist Ontology of Money” by Geoffrey Ingham (published by the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 2021) contends that “Historicising the Money of Account: A Critique of the Nominalist Ontology of Money” (published by the same journal in 2020) is based on misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and imprecisions. The core proposition in “Historicising the Money of Account” is that the money of account, which is generally understood to be a universal attribute of money, is in fact an institution of late medieval and early modern times that has no significant equivalent in today’s world (or in the ancient world, for that matter). This reply is intended to provide further clarification on the historical and ontological specificity of the late medieval institution of the money of account.
On the Power Lines—Electromagnetic Shielding Using Magnetic Steel Laminates

Protection against the electromagnetic fields around high-voltage transmission lines is an issue of great importance, especially in the case of buildings near power lines. Indeed, the developed fields can be harmful for the habitants and electrical/electronic devices, so the implementation of appropriate measures to address the above electromagnetic interference issue is necessary in order to ensure the safety of both human beings and equipment. Several practices have been proposed to reduce the electric and the magnetic fields around overhead and underground transmission lines (minimum distance, shielded cables, anechoic chamber etc.). In this context, the scope of the current paper is the use of highly permeable magnetic sheets for shielding purposes, along with the development of an appropriate procedure, based on finite element analysis (FEA) for the efficient design of passive shielding. The simulation results are compared with laboratory measurements in order to confirm the adequacy of the proposed methodology. The good agreement between the FEA outcomes and the experimental results confirms that the developed FEA tool can be trustfully used for the design of the shielding means in the case of overhead or underground power lines.
The Influence of Superhydrophobicity on Laminar Jet Impingement and Turbulent Flow in a Channel with Walls Exhibiting Riblets

The Influence of Superhydrophobicity on Laminar Jet Impingement and Turbulent Flow in a Channel with Walls Exhibiting Riblets Joseph F. Prince Department of Mechanical Engineering, BYU Doctor of Philosophy The object of this work is to explore the influence superhydrophobic (SH) surfaces exert in laminar jet impingement and when they are combined with riblets in turbulent channel flow. A SH surface generates an apparent slip due to the combination of micropatterning and chemical hydrophobicity. Because of surface tension, water does not enter the cavities between the features, increasing the contact angle of a water droplet on the surface and reducing the liquid-solid contact area. An analysis based on the integral momentum approach of Karman and Pohlhausen is presented that predicts jet impingement behavior on SH surfaces. The model is first applied to the scenario where the slip at the surface is isotropic and a downstream depth is imposed such that a circular hydraulic jump occurs. The model predicts the thin film parameters downstream of the jet and the radial location of the hydraulic jump. An increase in the hydraulic jump radius occurs as slip increases, momentum of the jet increases, or the downstream depth decreases. Modifications to the model are made for the scenario where the slip at the surface varies azimuthally, as would be the case for a surface patterned with microribs. The average behavior is similar, although now an elliptically shaped jump forms with the major axis aligned parallel to the rib/cavity structures. The ellipse eccentricity increases as the slip increases, the jet momentum increases, or the downstream depth decreases. Where there is no downstream depth imposed on SH surfaces, the thin film breaks up into droplets instead of forming a hydraulic jump. Further changes are made to the model to incorporate this behavior for isotropic and anisotropic surfaces resulting in circular and elliptically shaped breakups respectively. This work also explores SH surfaces with riblets in turbulent channel flow. Pressure drop measurements across surfaces exhibiting superhydrophobicity, riblets, and surfaces with both drag reducing mechanisms are presented. The SH surface reduces drag because the effective surface area is reduced and riblets are able to reduce drag by dampening the spanwise turbulence. Photolithography was used to fabricate all surface types. An aluminum channel with a control and a test section was used for testing. Pressure transducers recorded the pressure drop across smooth silicon wafers and patterned test surfaces simultaneously allowing for computation of the friction factors.
The Characterization of Material Properties and Structural Dynamics of the Manduca Sexta Forewing for Application to Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle Design

Abstract : The Manduca Sexta species of moth serves as a source of biological inspiration for the future of micro air vehicle flapping flight. The ability of this species to hover in flapping flight has warranted investigation into the critical material, structural, and geometric properties of the forewing of this biological specimen. A rigorous morphological study of the Manduca Sexta forewing was conducted to characterize the physical and material properties of the biological forewing for the purpose of developing an advanced parametric three dimensional model finite element analysis (FEA) model. This FEA model was tuned to match the experimentally determined structural dynamics of the biological specimen and serves as the basis for an engineered wing design. Manufacturing methods are developed and implemented to fabricate the baseline engineered wing design. Biological wings and engineered wings are experimentally tested to determine the aerodynamic lift production of each of wings under the same boundary conditions. Through this research, a structural dynamics based engineering methodology has been used to design, develop, and identify biomimetic engineered wings that experimentally produce aerodynamic forces equivalent to their biological analog.
MedAI: Transparency in Medical Image Segmentation

MedAI: Transparency in Medical Image Segmentation is a challenge held for the first time at the Nordic AI Meet that focuses on medical image segmentation and transparency in machine learning (ML)-based systems. We propose three tasks to meet specific gastrointestinal image segmentation challenges collected from experts within the field, including two separate segmentation scenarios and one scenario on transparent ML systems. The latter emphasizes the need for explainable and interpretable ML algorithms. We provide a development dataset for the participants to train their ML models, tested on a concealed test dataset.
Harnessing molasses as a low-cost carbon source for production of poly-hydroxy butyrate (PHB) using Burkholderia sp. B73 bacteria

Burkholderia sp. has been reported as a poly-hydroxy-butyrate (PHB) producer. PHB is a natural polyester class with a wide range of applications in foods, medicines, and biomedicines. However, the high production cost of PHB may limit its potential. Molasses, a by-product of the sugarcane industry available abundantly, may be used as an alternative carbon source of PHB production. In this research, we aimed to evaluate PHB production by Burkholderia sp. B73 in fermentation media using molasses as an alternative carbon source. Small-scale experiments were performed in Erlenmeyer flasks on a shaker at 150 rpm and 30 °C to evaluate the best initial C/N ratio for biomass accumulation and PHB production. A set of parameters including bacterial growth, dry cell weight, yield, and FTIR spectrum of PHB were observed. The results showed that molasses could be used to grow Burkholderia sp. B73 and the highest PHB production was obtained when a 20:1 C/N ratio of molasses was applied in the fermentation medium. In addition, when the initial pH was adjusted to 7.0, the highest PHB yield was also produced. More importantly, the use of molasses as a carbon source improved the PHB yield by nearly 2-fold compared with our previous report using a synthetic Ramsay’s minimal medium. In conclusion, the experiment results showed that molasses could be used as a low-cost carbon source for PHB production by Burkholderia sp. B73 bacteria.
The development of trust inventory.

The Trust in Construction project was a two-year EPSRC funded research into the impact of trust on construction project performance. Here we outline the development of the measurement tool used for assessing the level of trust in project team relationships, known as the Trust Inventory. We discuss the process and rationale for developing the Trust Inventory within the context of the study as a whole. The Trust Inventory was designed to support and integrate with a mixed methodology case study approach which looked at construction projects from a network perspective. By identifying key relationships in project teams and assessing the level of trust in those relationships, it would be possible to draw conclusions about the impact of trust in relationships on project performance.
Evaluation of Ultrasound Guided Measurement of Anterior Neck Soft Tissue Thickness in Predicting Difficult Laryngoscopy in Obese Patients

Background: The incidence of unanticipated difficult airway is 14.3-17.5% in obese. Preoperative difficult airway prediction is important to avoid postoperative morbidity and mortality. USG guided measurement of anterior neck soft tissue thickness can be used to predict difficult laryngoscopy in obese patients and we thus undertook this study to determine the role of USG guided measurement of anterior neck thickness at the level of vocal cords in difficult laryngoscopy prediction. Methods: Sixty obese patients (BMI≥30kg/m2), 18-70 years of age of either sex, were included. Anterior neck soft tissue thickness was measured by ultrasound as the distance from the skin to the anterior commissure of vocal cord. Neck circumference was measured at mid neck just below the laryngeal prominence with the subjects standing upright and facing forward with shoulders relaxed. Thyromental distance, sternomental distance, Mallampatti score and neck circumference were also recorded. Results: The cut off values of BMI (46.94 kg/m2), neck circumference (41.5 cm) and anterior neck soft tissue thickness (22.1mm). Four patients in the morbidly obese and 80% of the superobese patients had a difficult laryngoscopy. Sixteen (26.67%) patients had an anterior neck soft tissue thickness of >22.1mm. Of these, 11 (91.67%) patients had difficult laryngoscopy while one (8.33%) patient with anterior neck soft tissue thickness ≤ 22.1mm had difficult laryngoscopy (P<0.05). There was also significant association between neck circumference and BMI. Conclusion: The USG guided measurement of anterior neck soft tissue thickness, BMI and neck circumference can reliably predict difficult laryngoscopy in obese patients.
CAGFuzz: Coverage-Guided Adversarial Generative Fuzzing Testing for Image-Based Deep Learning Systems

Deep Neural Network (DNN) driven technologies have been extensively employed in various aspects of our life. Nevertheless, the applied DNN always fails to detect erroneous behaviors, which may lead to serious problems. Several approaches have been proposed to enhance adversarial examples for automatically testing deep learning (DL) systems, such as image-based DL systems. However, the approaches contain the following two limitations. First, existing approaches only take into account small perturbations on adversarial examples, they design and generate adversarial examples for a certain particular DNN model. This might hamper the transferability of the examples for other DNN models. Second, they only use shallow features (e.g., pixel-level features) to judge the differences between the generated adversarial examples and the original examples. The deep features, which contain high-level semantic information, such as image object categories and scene semantics, are completely neglected. To address these two problems, we propose CAGFuzz, a Coverage-guided Adversarial Generative Fuzzing testing approach for image-based DL systems. CAGFuzz is able to generate adversarial examples for mainstream DNN models to discover their potential errors. First, we train an Adversarial Example Generator (AEG) based on general datasets. AEG only considers the data characteristics to alleviate the transferability problem. Second, we extract the deep features of the original and adversarial examples, and constrain the adversarial examples by cosine similarity to ensure that the deep features of the adversarial examples remain unchanged. Finally, we use the adversarial examples to retrain the models. Based on several standard datasets, we design a set of dedicated experiments to evaluate CAGFuzz. The experimental results show that CAGFuzz can detect more hidden errors, enhance the accuracy of the target DNN models, and generate adversarial examples with higher transferability.
Dietary Exposure and Risk Assessment of Aflatoxin M1 for Children Aged 1 to 9 Years Old in Serbia

The present study was conducted to estimate the exposure and characterize the risk for the child population of Serbia to Aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) from milk and milk-based food. A total of 3404 samples comprising milk and different milk-based food samples were collected from various regions of Serbia from 2017 to 2019. Evaluation of AFM1 exposure was carried out using the deterministic method, whereas risk characterization was evaluated using the margin of exposure (MOE) and the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Detection rates for AFM1 in milk and milk-based food samples ranged between 2% and 79%, with the highest incidence (79%) and mean level (22.34 ± 0.018 ng kg−1) of AFM1 being detected in pasteurized and UHT milk. According to the three consumption estimates, the values of estimated daily intake (EDI) were higher for toddlers as compared with children aged 3–9 years. Children aged 1–3 years had the highest risk of exposure to AFM1 in milk, with an estimated daily intake of 0.164 and 0.193 ng kg−1 bw day−1 using lower bound (LB) and upper bound (UB) exposure scenarios, respectively. Such difference could result from the higher consumption to weight in younger children. Based on the estimated daily intake (EDI) found in this study, the risk of AFM1 exposure due to consumption of milk and milk-based food was low since the MOE values obtained were >10,000. In addition, the risk of HCC cases/year/105 individuals of different age groups showed that the value of HCC, using potency estimates of 0.0017 (mean), was maximum (0.00034) in the age group 1–3 years, which indicates no health risk for the evaluated groups. The present study revealed the importance of controlling and preventing AFM1 contamination in milk through continuous monitoring and regular inspection to reduce the risk of AFM1 exposure, especially in children.
Educational Aspirations and Expectations of Adolescents in Rural China: Determinants, Mental Health, and Academic Outcomes

Educational aspirations and expectations of adolescents have implications for educational and psychological outcomes. This study aimed to determine factors associated with educational aspiration–expectation discrepancies and to examine the associations between the discrepancies and psychological and academic outcomes in rural left-behind children and non-left-behind children aged 14–16 in mainland China. Cross-sectional data from a self-report survey were collected in 2020 among 606 rural students (mean age = 14.85 years) in two public middle schools in Songzi county, Hubei Province. Participants filled in questionnaires measuring their socio-demographic information, educational aspirations and expectations, academic performance, parental and friends’ aspirations, academic self-perception, academic self-regulation, depression, and self-esteem. Results showed that more than half of the participants reported that they felt they were not likely to attain the level of education to which they aspired. Parental migration, academic performance, mother’s educational aspirations for children, and close friends’ educational aspirations were the main factors associated with students’ educational aspiration–expectation discrepancies. Both left-behind children and non-left-behind children whose aspirations exceed expectations were more likely to report lower self-esteem, higher depression, lower academic self-perception, and poorer self-regulation than those without a discrepancy. These findings have implications for families, schools, and policymakers through informing the development of interventions that target positive development in rural youth.
Unsaturated Soil Consolidation Theory and Laboratory Experimental Data

The volume change process of an unsaturated soil was considered as a transient flow problem with water and air flowing simultaneously under an applied stress gradient. Laboratory experiments were performed to study the volume change behavior of unsaturated soils. Several compacted kaolin specimens were tested using modified Anteus oedometers and triaxial cells. Theoretical analyses were also made to best-fit the results from laboratory experiments. The fitting was accomplished by approximating the compressibility coefficients and adjusting the coefficients of permeability. The comparisons of the results obtained from the theory and the laboratory yield to a similar behavior of volume changes with respect to time.
Contrasting functions of the epithelial-stromal interaction 1 gene, in human oral and lung squamous cell cancers

The epithelial-stromal interaction 1 gene (EPSTI1) is known to play multiple roles in the malignant progression of breast cancer and also in some aspects of the immune responses to the tumor. However, the relevance of the gene in the onset/progression of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) is not yet known. The present study was aimed at revealing the roles of EPSTI1 in conferring malignant characteristics to OSCC and LSCC, and the underlying mechanisms. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and western blot analyses demonstrated significant upregulation of EPSTI1 in all four OSCC cell lines (HSC2, HSC3, HSC3-M3 and HSC4), and significant downregulation of EPST11 in all three LSCC cell lines (LK-2, EBC-1 and H226) used in the present study, as compared to the expression levels in the corresponding control cell lines. Both knockdown of EPST11 in OSCC and overexpression of the gene in LSCC suppressed cell proliferation, and induced cell-cycle arrest in the G1 phase, with upregulation of p21 and downregulation of CDK2 and cyclin D1. Furthermore, these alterations of EPST11 gene expression in the OSCC and LSCC cell lines suppressed the cell migration ability and reversed the EMT phenotype of the tumor cells. Collectively, while EPSTI1 appears to have oncogenic roles in OSCC, it appears to exert tumor-suppressive roles in LSCC. PCR array analyses revealed some genes whose expression levels were altered along with the modified EPSTI1 expression in both the OSCC and LSCC cell lines. These findings suggest that EPSTI1 may be a therapeutic target for both OSCC and LSCC.